Desktop/Laptop

• System76 refreshes Kudu Linux-based laptops with Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU

  Linux-based laptop OEM System76 is updating the Kudu lineup with a 2022 model that combines the high-end performance of the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX APU with the mid-range Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU and the versatility of a Linux distro. Users can choose among System76’s proprietary Pop!_OS versions or the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

  Besides the powerful APU and GPU combo, the latest Kudu6 laptops feature 15.6-inch screens with 1080p resolution and 144 Hz refresh rate, up to 64 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, and up to 4 TB of NVMe SSD storage via 2x M.2 slots. Connectivity includes 2.5 GbE + Wi-Fi 6 + BT 5, while the system can support up to three external video sources through a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 with DP 1.4, miniDP 1.4 connector, plus an HDMI video out.

  Additionally, there are ports such as 1x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, 1x USB-A 3.2 Gen and 1x USB 2.0, plus audio jacks. The new model weighs 4.85 lbs (2.2 kg) and comes equipped with a rather small 48.96 Wh battery. Standard features like a 720p webcam and multi-color keyboard are offered, as well.

  Price-wise, the base model with 8 GB of RAM and 240 GB storage starts at US$1,799, while a fully equipped model that includes mechanical keys and carrying bag would cost $US3,906.

• System76-Scheduler Is A New Pop!_OS Rust Effort To Improve Desktop Responsiveness

  Quietly making its v1.0 debut today is system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution.

  System76 Scheduler describes itself as…

• System76 Releases AMD-Powered Kudu Laptop

  Denver-based System76 welcomes back a familiar face to their laptop lineup with the Kudu.

  System76 has finally brought back the popular Kudu laptop workstation powerhouse. This time around the laptop is equipped with a 3rd-gen AMD (Zen 3) Ryzen 9 5900HX H-class processor with 8 cores and 16 threads. The CPU runs at 3.3 GHz but can be boosted up to 4.6 GHz.

  The Kudu is paired with NVIDIA RTX 3060 graphics and up to 64GB of Dual Channel DDR4 memory.

  According to Ben Shpurker, Product Manager at System76, “This combination makes it the perfect machine for creating on the go.”

  The 15″ FHD matte display and a thin bezel, but for creators of all kinds, the Kudu laptop can manage up to three external displays with one HDMI port, one mini DisplayPort, and one DisplayPort over USB-C.

• 11 Funniest Linux Meme Distros, Software, and Commands – Linux Stans

  We’ve already featured serious Linux distros like distros for servers and distros for programming. Now, it’s time to blow off some steam with a few funny Linux distros and software.

  All of these Linux distros and software are actually usable, and they have a funny spin to them. We won’t include unique distros like Damn Vulnerable Linux, GoboLinux, or certain religious Linux distros. We might create a different list for them. In this article, we’ll only feature funny distros and software that are just a meme.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Hackaday Invades the FLOSS Weekly Podcast

  Regular Hackaday readers will know that we’re big supporters of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) around these parts. There’s an excellent chance you are too, as so many of the incredible projects you send our way make it a habit to share their innermost details, from firmware source code to the OpenSCAD files that generate its 3D printed components. So when our recently minted Editor in Chief [Elliot Williams] was invited to join This Week in Tech’s FLOSS Weekly podcast, he jumped at the chance to represent our little corner of the Internet to the wider world of open source aficionados.

• Hackaday (FLOSS Weekly 666: Hackaday – Elliot Williams, Open Source & Hacking)

  Hackaday.com is what its new editor-in-chief, Elliot Williams, calls “a library of Alexandra for fugitive hacks”—and that’s just one of the many deep and quotable things he shares with Doc Searls and co-host Jonathan Bennett, who is also a veteran Hackaday writer. Topics range from hackable gizmo and the hacker mindset, to how great open firmware hacks become bait for cool new hackable products coming out of China.

• Steam Deck Only Has 200 Verified Games?!? – Invidious

Kernel Space

• Parallel x86_64 CPU Bringup Linux Patches Revised For Quicker Boot Times – Phoronix

  The Linux kernel patches that alow bringing up x86_64 CPU cores in parallel when booting the system have been revised for faster boot times on today’s systems from high core count desktops to massive servers.

  This patch series led by longtime kernel developer David Woodhouse is about allowing secondary x86_64 CPU cores to be brought up in parallel. While prior versions of the patch series noted a 15x speed-up, his testing of the new “v4″ patches on other hardware is showing a drop from around 500ms down to 100ms.

• Lenovo’s Platform Profile Support For AMD Systems On Linux Has Been Busted – Phoronix

  ACPI Platform Profile support on Linux has been useful for catering to balancing your power or performance preferences with modern laptops on Linux. It has worked well in general across various devices tested but it turns out to be a dud currently when it comes to AMD Ryzen powered Lenovo systems.

  ACPI Platform Profile support allows setting the power/balance/power-savings preference (among other possible profiles) on Linux with recent kernel activity that so far has seen major support available for major laptop brands like Lenovo, Dell, and ASUS. The user’s profile preference can be set via a sysfs interface or desktops like KDE Plasma and GNOME have already added convenient user interfaces for setting it nicely from the system settings area.

• Graphics Stack

  • Download NVIDIA 510.47.03 Graphics Driver For Linux | Itsubuntu.com

    Finally, NVIDIA 510.47.03 proprietary graphics driver is available for Linux-based operating systems. In this driver software, you can find support for Linux 5.17 kernel series and support for the d Vulkan 1.3 graphics API.

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: Wew

    Nothing too exciting. Mostly bug fixes. I managed to sneak ARB_sparse_texture_clamp in for zink just before the branchpoint, so all the sparse texturing features supported by Mesa will be supported by zink. But only on NVIDIA since they’re the only driver that fully supports Vulkan sparse texturing.

    The past couple days I’ve been doing some truly awful things with gl_PointSize to try and make this conformant for all possible cases. It’s a real debacle, and I’ll probably post more in-depth about it so everyone can get a good chuckle.

Intel

• Intel’s “Software Defined Silicon” Linux Support Moving Along – Phoronix

  While Intel has not publicly announced their plans around Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), the Linux kernel patches allowing activation of licensed CPU features is continuing to move forward toward mainline integration.

• Intel Announces “Project Circuit Breaker” To Expand Its Bug Bounty Program – Phoronix

  Intel today is announcing Project Circuit Breaker as a broadening of its bug bounty program for “elite hackers” to help discover areas for improvement within Intel’s hardware/software security.

• Intel’s Vulkan Linux Driver Adds Experimental Mesh Shader Support For DG2/Alchemist – Phoronix

  Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan driver for Linux systems now has experimental support for mesh shaders that work with their forthcoming Intel Arc DG2/Alchemist graphics cards.

Applications

• XMPP and Mail Clients – WindfluechterNet Blog

  I really like XMPP, but I’m a little unhappy about the current general situation of XMPP. I think XMPP could do better if there were some benefits of having an XMPP address. For me one of those benefits is to have the option to have just one address I need to communicate to others. If everything is in place and well-configured, a user can be reached by mail, XMPP and SIP (voice/video calls) by just one address.

  To address this I would like to see XMPP support in mail clients (MUAs). So when you reply to a mail or write a new one, the client will do a lookup in your addressbook if the address has an XMPP field associated with it and (if not) do a DNS lookup for _xmpp-server._tcp.example.com (or the matching domain part of recipients address). If there is an XMPP address listed in mail header, that JID will be used. When the lookup is successful and an xmpp: protocol handler is configured in the system, the MUA offers an option to begin a chat with the recipient and/or displays the presence status of the recipients (depending on available web-presence or presence subscription).

• Standard Notes – A tidy little note-taking program

  Note taking. This is one of those things that everyone does, and often, in a rather unique, individual way. Some people leave themselves reminders using physical sticky notes glued to the door of their fridge. Others have reminders in their calendar. Others yet keep information in text files on their desktop. Or you hire a person whose job is to do it for you. Many ways indeed. How about a dedicated tool?

  [...]

  ‘Tis a short review, I admit. But then, Standard Notes delivered on its promise. It’s a program that helps you keep a bunch of notes sorted and organized, you can tag your notes, protect them in case they contain sensitive information, and if you go for a full account, you can then also back them up online. Quite handy.

  Now, does that mean my days of desktop files are over? Well, no. There’s one more thing that notes are supposed to do – constantly remind you of what you should be doing. Hence the desktopness of the whole idea, in me book. But then, you can also have calendar reminders, alerts and alarms, and you could just keep notes of practical things worth remembering, in which case, notes become bookmarks, citations, or diaries. I don’t think I can solve the bigger philosophical problem of how people are meant to work with notes. If you like it tidy, Standard Notes does a pretty decent job. And we’re done.

Instructionals/Technical

• Gathering Information on Your Wi-Fi NIC and Connection on Linux — Virtualization Review

  I have been working with a lot of edge devices and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) clients lately and one of the issues that I have encountered is that many of these devices have built-in Wi-Fi that I need to monitor and gather information about.

  Because many edge devices run Linux — which in turn means a wide variety of Linux versions and GUI interfaces that each supports — I have found it easier to use the command line to monitor the Wi-Fi of these devices.

  In this article, I will show you some of the command-line tools that I use to monitor Wi-Fi NICs on Linux edge devices.

• Install osTicket Ticketing System on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04 – kifarunix.com

  In this tutorial, you will learn how to install osTicket Ticketing system on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04. osTicket is an opensource ticketing system.

• How to install Crab Game by Dani on a Chromebook – Updated Tutorial

  Today we are looking at how to install Crab Game by Dani on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

  This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

• How to install Inkscape on Zorin OS 16 – Invidious

  In this video, we are looking at how to install Inkscape on Zorin OS 16. Enjoy!

• How To Install Lighttpd on Linux Mint 20 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Lighttpd on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Lighttpd is a free, open-source, and high-performance web server designed for speed-critical environments. Lighttpd doesn’t require a lot of memory and CPU usage which makes it one of the best servers for any project that needs speed in deploying web pages. Moreover, it also provides full support for HTTPS.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of a Lighttpd on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

• How to Backup & Restore MongoDB on Ubuntu – TechAcute

  MongoDB is one of the most renowned NoSQL Database Engines. It is widely regarded as a Database that is highly powerful, scalable, and reliable to use. MongoDB leverages JSON-like documents with optional schemas to function efficiently. MongoDB supports a unique Document-based Data Model that helps developers map data and code. MongoDB further empowers application development by providing a unified and robust API for querying.

  MongoDB lets you optimize, scale, and deploy your applications seamlessly with built-in sharding, replication, performance tools, and indexing to help you run confidently in production. MongoDB ensures that your performance SLAs are met in any conducive environment irrespective of whether it’s 450 million users around the world or your first customer.

• How to install Manjaro 21.2.2 – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Manjaro 21.2.2

• How to Install Magento 2.4 With OpenLiteSpeed on Ubuntu 20.04 – RoseHosting

  This blog post is about installing Magento 2.4 with OpenLiteSpeed as a web server on Ubuntu 20.04 OS.

  Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP that uses multiple PHP frameworks such as Symfony and Laminas. OpenLiteSpeed is an open-source web server that offers high performance, security and can be used for handling huge traffic for the website. Magento with a combination of OpenLiteSpeed can provide a very powerful and fast website performance.

  For this setup, we will need about 30 minutes for everything to be configured properly. Let’s get started!

• Linux Whatis Command – ByteXD

  Linux whatis command is used to display the brief manual page description of Linux commands. The manual page contains a detailed description of each specified command or option. So, we can say that it helps you to provide a quick short description of a Linux command. It searches for the arguments from its index databases that are provided with the whatis command to view the short manual page description.

  We will explore in this article what is the purpose of the whatis command. We can use whatis along with different options.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GStreamer 1.18.6 stable bug fix release

    The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the stable 1.18 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

    This release only contains bugfixes and security fixes, and it should be safe to update from 1.18.x.

  • Jean-François Fortin Tam: Year MMXVI in 1 ½ minute

    I completed my 2nd term on the board of the GNOME Foundation, and wrote a report summarizing my duties that year.
    At the end of these two terms, I decided to leave the GNOME Foundation board, as I felt like I had accomplished what I had to accomplish, and because I wanted to get back some balance in my personal life, as well as the ability to focus on my other non-profit work and professional duties.

  • Christian Hergert: GSignalGroup and GBindingGroup

    Some of the first abstractions we made when creating GNOME Builder are now available to everyone in GObject!

    In particular, writing Text Editors requires tracking lots of information and changes from various sources. Sometimes those changes come from 2nd-degree objects via the object you really care about.

    For example, with a GtkTextView that might mean tracking changes to a GtkTextBuffer, GtkTextTagTable, or many other application-specific accessory objects through the form of signals and properties.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core Linux 13 Released: Needs Just 46MB of RAM, 50MB of Disk

    Tiny Core Linux has been updated to v13.0, following its recently established annual cadence. This veteran ultra light Linux distribution is remarkably compact by today’s standards, requiring a mere 22MB download. However, it installs and presents the user with a fully graphical UI, with a modern Linux kernel, and allows you to install and run modern applications (but keep it simple if you install this OS due to your PC being ancient).

• Arch Family

  • Arch Linux – News: Debug packages and debuginfod

    We are very happy to announce that debug packages are now available in Arch Linux. Debug symbols and source listing are provided through our debuginfod instance which can be utilized by debuggers such as gdb and delve. https://debuginfod.archlinux.org/ A couple of sponsored mirrors are providing the debug repositories while we figure out and communicate the new mirror requirements.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Máirín Duffy: Wacom calibration troubleshooting on Fedora

    My colleague Madeline Peck have the same laptop that we each got late this past fall. It’s the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen 6, and it is a dream computer, with integrated Wacom screen and stylus

    Recently though, Madeline noticed the cursor was a bit off from where she placed the stylus on the screen. The issue only seemed to be happening in Krita, but was enough to cause an issue. I suggested trying the GNOME Wacom calibration tool in GNOME Settings, thinking that even though there was a slim chance it’d help (since the issue only affected Krita), at the very least it wouldn’t do any harm and might improve the X,Y calibration of the tablet.

    It threw the calibration off a good 4 inches. Repeated calibrations using the tool didn’t improve the issue.

• Debian Family

  • Raspberry Pi OS enters the 64-bit era (but 32-bit is still the default option)

    
    Raspberry Pi has been using 64-bit processors for its tiny, low-cost computers since the organization launched the Raspberry Pi 3 in early 2016. But up until now the official Raspberry Pi OS has been 32-bit only.

    Now, after months of beta testing, the folks at Raspberry Pi have released the first official build of Raspberry Pi OS that’s available in either 32-bit or 64-bit versions.

  • Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian OS Finally Spins 64-bit Version

  • Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit)

  • Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) Now Available

    Massive good news for the Raspberry lover as the Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit edition is now available for download. Raspberry Pi OS was available only as a 32-bit operating system.

    Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4), Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3), Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ (CM3+), Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 400, Raspberry Pi 3A+, Raspberry Pi 3B+, and Raspberry Pi 3B will support Raspberry Pi OS.

  • Sparky news 2022/01

    The 1st monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2022:
    – Linux kernel updated up to 5.16.4 & 5.17-rc1
    – Added to repos: Signal Desktop, Mullvad VPN
    – NsCDE Desktop updated up to 2.0 (twice); debs built for amd64, i386, armhf & arm64
    – all sparky services, including repos moved to a new, bigger server
    – mirror de1.repo.sparkylinux.org canceled
    – Sparky 5.16 Nibiru of the oldstable line released
    – Sparky Center LXDE updated so can be installed back to LXDE desktop

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Linux Server Management in 2022 | Ubuntu [Ed: server push of Landscape, which is non-free]

    Linux server management is an integration of cybersecurity and business objectives. Linux server management at scale is a vastly different activity from interacting with a terminal on one machine. The best Linux server management tools universally offer a server management GUI within a web browser. Implementation details matter, especially in a pay-for-compute world. Sysadmin tools that don’t have a lightweight footprint increase overall compute costs. Some of the most popular open source and free Linux server management tools scale poorly, when managing more than one machine. Requiring system administrators to perform the same tasks repetitiously across several machines increases the time it takes to manage the entire estate. Beyond inefficiency, manual administration also introduces risks associated with human error. Server management should be automated as much as possible, through policy-aware tooling that can define when different groups of machines get patched.

  • The International Space Station Starts Minting NFTs

    The hardware powering Celestium is located in NASA’s part of the ISS. The servers run Ubuntu Linux, with a custom kernel designed to operate on resource-constrained systems.

    Despite its seemingly playful nature, the project has a very serious goal: to demonstrate data storage, onboard processing, and edge of network computing as a prototype of lunar-based cloud services.

    The NFTs minted by Celestium won’t be sold for cash. In order to receive the tokens, individuals must contribute images to a collaborative artwork that will be sent into space in March 2022 as a contemporary portrayal of humanity. They can then exchange their ‘fungible tokens’ into NFTs that signify the ownership of a specific asteroid, and its accompanying AI-generated image.

Devices/Embedded

• Amlogic based home automation hubs start at $52

  JetHome’s $52-and-up “JetHub H1” and $57-and-up, DIN-rail ready “JetHub D1” home automation hubs run Linux on Amlogic S905W and A113X SoCs, respectively, and provide 10/100 LAN, WiFi/BT, USB, and Zigbee. The D1 adds RS485, 1-Wire, relays, and more.

  St. Petersburg, Russia based JetHome has launched a pair of low-cost, Arm-based automation controllers with Fast Ethernet, WiFi/Bluetooth, and Zigbee connectivity. The more affordable JetHome JetHub H1 is focused on basic home automation while the more I/O-rich, DIN-rail form-factor JetHome JetHub D1 supports more sophisticated automation networks.

• A Portable Projecting Pi For Education | Hackaday

  We cover a lot of cyberdeck projects here at Hackaday, custom portable computers often built around the Raspberry Pi. It’s not often that we cover a computer that perfectly achieves and exceeds what a cyberdeck is trying to do without being a cyberdeck in any way, but that’s what [Subir Bhaduri] has done. In addressing the need for Indian schoolchildren to catch up on two years of COVID-disrupted schooling he’s created the pπ, a Raspberry Pi, projector, and keyboard all-in-one computer in a neat sheet-metal case that looks as though it might be just another set of spanners or similar. At a stroke he’s effortlessly achieved the ultimate cyberdeck, because this machine is no sci-fi prop, instead it has a defined use which it fulfills admirably.

• Did You Know That The Raspberry Pi 4 Has More SPI, I2C, UART Ports? | Hackaday

  We’ve gotten used to the GPIO-available functions of Raspberry Pi computers remaining largely the same over the years, which is why it might have flown a little bit under the radar: the Raspberry Pi 4 has six SPI controllers, six I2C controllers, and six UARTs – all on its 40-pin header. You can’t make use of all of these at once, but with up to four different connections wired to a single pin you can carve out a pretty powerful combination of peripherals for your next robotics, automation or cat herding project.

  The datasheet for these peripherals is pleasant to go through, with all the register maps nicely laid out – even if you don’t plan to work with the register mappings yourself, the maintainers of your preferred hardware enablement libraries will have an easier time! And, of course, these peripherals are present on the Compute Module 4, too. It might feel like such a deluge of interfaces is excessive, however, it lets you achieve some pretty cool stuff that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • This DIY power bank can deliver up to 60W and displays info in real-time

    The advent of USB-C and the power delivery (PD) standard have allowed for a single cable to carry both large amounts of data and power for a wide range of devices. So, while looking for a PD-capable power bank for his laptop but only coming across expensive units, Instructables user Toby Chui decided to make his own — with additional improvements, of course.

  • Golioth IoT development platform offers Zephyr SDK, support for nRF9160, ESP32, and over 100 other platforms – CNX Software

    There are already plenty of IoT development platforms, but here’s another one with Golioth that relies on a Zephyr SDK, “first-tier” support for Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 (cellular) and Espressif Systems ESP32-C3 (WiFi), as well as a QEMU-based simulator for easy testing.

    The use of an open-source Zephyr SDK even enables them to support over 100+ hardware components, and the company, also called Golioth, says their platform scales from one device for evaluation to one million devices during deployment, thanks notably to a free Dev Tier account to get started at no cost.

  • Repairing Librem 14 Part 1: RAM/WiFi/Storage/Battery – Purism

    The Librem 14 is deliberately made easy to repair and upgrade. By removing just a few screws, you can easily replace the battery, wifi module, RAM, or the M.2 ssd. This is really nice if you already own hardware you’d like to put in a barebones Librem 14 order, or if you want to upgrade the hardware in your current Librem 14.

  • Open Hardware 5V UPS Improves On Cheap Powerbank Design | Hackaday

    Often, we need to power a 5V-craving project of ours on the go. So did [Burgduino], and, unhappy with solutions available, designed their own 5V UPS! It takes a cheap powerbank design and augments it with a few parts vital for its UPS purposes.

    You might be tempted to reach for a powerbank when facing such a problem, but most of them have a fatal flaw, and you can’t easily tell a flawed one apart from a functioning one before you buy it. This flaw is lack of load sharing – ability to continue powering the output when a charger is inserted. Most store-bought powerbanks just shut the output off, which precludes a project running 24/7 without powering it down, and can cause adverse consequences when something like a Raspberry Pi is involved.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android 13: Release Date, Compatible Devices, Features and More

  • One UI 4.0 based on Android 12 comes to Galaxy Z Flip 5G users in the US – NotebookCheck.net News

  • The Google One VPN for Android just got a little safer – Android Authority

  • 5 Tips to improve Android battery life – Geeky Gadgets

  • Top 9 Ways to Fix Keyboard Typing Lag on Android

  • Genius Android trick can help you find closest free internet in your city

  • How to use your phone as an Android TV remote control

  • Scrcpy’s latest update brings keyboard and mouse passthrough without USB debugging

  • Lenovo Tab P11 Plus review: Striking the perfect budget balance | Android Central

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• curl dash-dash-json

  The curl “cockpit” is yet again extended with a new command line option: –json. The 245th command line option.

  curl is a generic transfer tool for sending and receiving data across networks and it is completely agnostic as to what it transfers or even why.

  To allow users to craft all sorts of transfers, or requests if you will, it offers a wide range of command line options. This flexibility has made it possible for a large number of users to keep using curl even as network ecosystems and its (HTTP) use have changed over time.

• Events

  • CFP: Binary T00ls Summit 2022

    The Binary T00ls Summit 2022 (https://binary-tools.net/summit) is an informal, technical, online event oriented to authors, users and enthusiasts of FLOSS programs that deal with binary data.
    This includes binary editors, libraries to encode and decode data, parser generators, binary data description languages and frameworks, binary formats and encodings, assemblers, debuggers, reverse engineering suites, and the like.
    The goal of this event is for developers to get in touch with each other, introduce their tools, have interesting and hopefully
    productive discussions, and finally what is most important: to have fun.
    The venue of the event will be an instance of the Big Blue Button web conferencing system, accessible using Firefox, Chromium and other web browsers. We will be having a single track that will span for three days during a weekend.
    The summit will be held on the first weekend of March 2022, From Friday 4 to Sunday 6.

• Web Browsers

  • Chromium

    • Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop

      The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 98 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. Chrome 98 is also promoted to our new extended stable channel for Windows and Mac. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

      Chrome 98.0.4758.80/81/82 for windows and 98.0.4758.80 for mac and linux contains a number of fixes and improvements — a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 98.

    • Google Chrome 98 Released With COLRv1 For Smaller Emoji Files – Phoronix

      Chrome 98 is available today as Google’s second web browser update of the new year. The Chrome 98 changes are mostly on the developer-side but with some user-impacting differences.

      Among the changes in Chrome 98 as Google’s stable browser update for February 2022 are:

      - COLRv1 color gradient vector fonts support that is motivated by wanting smaller emoji files for the web while delivering better quality. COLRv1 fonts compress well, are vector-based, and work well with gradients. Google Chrome and Google Fonts teams consider the COLRv1 specification as their successor format to the Google Noto emoji font. The emoji font size is around 20% the size as previously while also having greater rendering fidelity. More details on COLRv1 via developer.chrome.com.

    • Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome | CISA

      Google has released Chrome versions 98.0.4758.80/81/82 for Windows and 98.0.4758.80 for Mac and Linux. These versions address vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.

  • Mozilla

    • Hacks.Mozilla.Org: Retrospective and Technical Details on the recent Firefox Outage [Ed: A reminder that under ‘new’ Mozilla Firefox became spyware that phones “mother ship”]

      On January 13th 2022, Firefox became unusable for close to two hours for users worldwide. This incident interrupted many people’s workflow. This post highlights the complex series of events and circumstances that, together, triggered a bug deep in the networking code of Firefox.

      [...]

      As part of the incident response process, we quickly discovered that the client was hanging inside a network request to one of the Firefox internal services. However, at this point we neither had an explanation for why this would trigger just now, nor what the scope of the problem was. We continued to look for the “trigger” — some change that must have occurred to start the problem. We found that we had not shipped updates or configuration changes that could have caused this problem. At the same time, we were keeping in mind that HTTP/3 had been enabled since Firefox 88 and was actively used by some popular websites.

      [...]

      With the load balancer change in place, and a special code path in a new Rust service now active, the necessary final ingredient to trigger the problem for users was deep in Necko HTTP/3 code.

      When handling a request, the code looked up the field in a case-sensitive way and failed to find the header as it had been lower-cased by viaduct. Without the header, the request was determined by the Necko code to be complete, leaving the real request body unsent. However, this code would only terminate when there was no additional content to send. This unexpected state caused the code to loop indefinitely rather than returning an error. Because all network requests go through one socket thread, this loop blocked any further network communication and made Firefox unresponsive, unable to load web content.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • MariaDB announces plans to go public for $672m via SPAC • The Register

    MariaDB Corporation Ab, which sells the popular open source database by the same name, said on Tuesday that it intends to become a public company with the help of Angel Pond Holdings Corporation.

    The deal, announced in a S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commissio,n [PDF] describes the Cayman Islands-based biz as a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). It was formed by Shihuang “Simon” Xie, a co-founder of Alibaba Group, and Theodore Wang, a former Goldman Sachs partner, to raise capital from investors in order to acquire another company.

    SPAC-driven deals have become popular in recent years partly as a defense against market volatility, which can complicate initial public offerings when companies try to go the traditional route to market. They also provide a clearer exit path for investors, allowing acquired firms to go public more quickly and at less cost, and to negotiate their value directly with the SPAC.

    However, US government regulators have expressed concern about the rising number of SPAC-based deals. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler last May said, SPACs raise a number of policy questions, like whether retail investors are appropriately protected and how SPACs fit into the SEC mission to maintain fair markets.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LibreOffice 7.3 Released with an Attention for Those Switching from MS Office

    The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.3, including a large number of fixes intended to compatibility with Microsoft Office.

    A new version of the open source office suite LibreOffice has been released earlier today. LibreOffice 7.3 is available for all supported platforms. Core improvements include better interoperability with Microsoft Office document formats, performance improvements, and new handling of change tracking in tables.

    LibreOffice is one of the best-known open source office suites. It is a free Microsoft Office alternative, complete with a spreadsheet program, database tool, presentation maker, and word processor. The project was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle inherited the latter through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009.

    Reading and writing to Microsoft Office file formats, like DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX remains a key ask of this open source office suite and something its millions of users rely on daily. Well, with the new 7.3 release, things get even better.

  • LibreOffice 7.3.0 Released! How to Install in Ubuntu 20.04, 21.10 & 18.04 | UbuntuHandbook

    Ubuntu’s default office suite LibreOffice released new major version 7.3.0 today. Here’s what’s new and how to install it in all current Ubuntu editions.

    LibreOffice 7.3 provided a large number of improvements to Microsoft Office file formats support. It now loads large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files and some complex documents faster!

• Programming/Development

  • Design and Prototypical Implementation of an IRC Chat Server in Erlang OTP | Linux Journal

    By the time of this article, digital services provide key functionality to businesses and everyday life. Due to the progress of digitization, the reliance on digital services has been growing rapidly. This process is not only shown by the growing number of inter connected devices that communicate with each other but also by the impact of unavailable services during an incident: On the 4th of October 2021, Meta (former Facebook) and all of its organizations (e.g. Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger) were unavailable for up to seven hours. The outage resulted in a huge profit loss for the company and connected businesses. [1]

    This outrage shows that modern solutions must be designed resiliently to enable service provisioning during incidents. There are multiple solutions to develop high-available and reliable services that can be applied to various levels in a system’s architecture and design. Some programming languages are specifically designed to meet these challenges. The functional programming language Erlang provides inherent functionality to develop these resilient services.

    Therefore, this article presents the exemplary design and development of a communication service based on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol in Erlang to investigate its availability features.

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • 50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell • The Register

      Of course, those 50 lines do not include all the gubbins required to render things on a browser nor the hooks to send a smug little post out to social media so your friends can see how clever you are. However, the requisite colours are present and correct, as is the frustration factor as the attempts mount up without success.

      Thankfully, a thoughtful command line parameter (unlimit) will up the limit from six tries to quite a bit more.

      We took the script for a spin on a tame Linux box (in this case, running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) and can confirm that, after a quick chmod to make things executable, tapping in ./wordle.sh got us our fix.

Digital transformation in Eastern Europe | Stop at Zona-M

Among many other things, the European Union the EU supports digital transformation in partner countries. This week, for example, they signed a Joint Declaration with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. In this area, that currently suffers from high instability, digitization is a priority and an important element of dialogue at several levels, from physical infrastructures to roaming agreements and training. These are the parts that I personally find more interesting in the full Joint Declaration:

A: Modernisation and innovation efforts at all levels of education and training will be pursued. This includes structured cooperation between EU and partner countries’ universities, VET institutions and youth organisations, as well as the promotion of youth employment, employability, entrepreneurship and skills, including addressing brain drain.

Building Forged Carbon Fiber Wings For Radio Control Cars | Hackaday

When it comes to building decent aerodynamic devices, you want to focus on getting your geometry accurate, and making sure your parts are strong enough to deal with the force they’re generating. This build from [Engineering After Hours] delivers on those fronts, consisting of a high-downforce wing for a small RC car.

The video points out that, at best, even a decent RC car will have pretty crappy aerodynamic parts from the factory, with a lift-to-drag (L/D)ratio of 2-3:1 at best. This means that, while they may create some small amount of downforce, they’re also creating plenty of drag at the same time.

The dual-element wing designed here is much more efficient, hitting an L/D ratio in the vicinity of 17:1 – a huge improvement. Even a casual eye can note that the design looks a lot more like something you’d see on a full-size car, versus some of the whackier designs seen on toys.

The wing is built with a forged carbon fiber process using 3D-printed molds, to give the wing plenty of strength. Given that it’s built for an RC car that can do over 100 mph, making sure the wing is stiff enough to perform at speed is key.

Science

• Simple Setup Answers Complex Question On The Physics Of Solids | Hackaday

  Thought experiments can be extremely powerful; after all, pretty much everything that [Einstein] came up with was based on thought experiments. But when a thought experiment turns into a real experiment, that’s when things can get really interesting, and where unexpected insights crop up.

  Take [AlphaPhoenix]’s simple question: “Are solid objects really solid?” On the face of it, this seems like a silly and trivial question, but the thought experiment he presents reveals more. He posits that pushing on one end of a solid metal rod a meter or so in length will result in motion at the other end of the rod pretty much instantly. But what if we scale that rod up considerably — say, to one light-second in length. Is a displacement at one end of the rob instantly apparent at the other end? It’s a bit of a mind-boggler.

• Time And Accuracy In Las ATMegas | Hackaday

  Do you ever have to ensure that an exact amount of time passes between two tasks in your microcontroller code? Do you know what’s the difference between precision and accuracy? Today, [Jim Mack] tells us about pushing timers and interrupts to their limits when it comes to managing time, while keeping it applicable to an ever-popular ATMega328P target! Every now and then, someone decides to push the frontiers of what’s possible on a given platform, and today’s rules is coding within constraints of an Arduino environment. However, you should check [Jim]’s post out even if you use Arduino as a swearword – purely for all of the theoretical insights laid out, accompanied by hardware-accurate examples!

  [...]

  Keeping our projects true to the passage of time can be an issue, and we’ve been at it for ages – calibrating your RC oscillator is a rite of passage for any ATTiny project. If you ever decide to have an interrupt peripheral help you with timing issues, we’ve gone in-depth on that topic in the past, with a three-part series describing the benefits, the drawbacks and the edgecases of interrupts. Going for a more modern target? Our piece on using interrupts with STM32 is a great path for trying out tools of the modern age.

Hardware

• Analog Computer Made From LEGO Predicts Tides | Hackaday

  Although the tides in the ocean are caused by the motion of the Sun and the Moon, both of which are easy to observe, accurately predicting the tide more than a few days in advance turns out to be rather difficult. The math behind the tidal movement is so complex that some of the earliest analog computers were built specifically to perform tide calculations. Sir William Thomson (better known as Lord Kelvin) designed one such “tide-predicting machine”, an impressive arrangement of gears and pulleys, back in the late 19th century.

• The Wanhao Duplicator CNC Heat Sealer | Hackaday

  [Thane Hunt] needed to find a way to make a variety of different heat-seal patterns on a fluid heat exchanger made from polyolefin film, and didn’t want all the lead time and expense of a traditional sealing press machined from a steel plate. Pattern prototyping meant that the usual approach would not allow sufficient iteration speed and decided to take a CNC approach. Now, who can think of a common tool, capable of positioning in the X-Y plane, with a drivable Z axis and a controlled heat source? Of course, nowadays the answer is the common-or-garden FDM 3D printer. As luck would have it, [Thane] had an older machine to experiment with, so with a little bit of nozzle sanding, and a sheet of rubber on the bed, it was good to go!

• Defective 3D Printing For Great Strength | Hackaday

  Most of us want our 3D prints to be perfect. But at Cornell University, they’ve been experimenting with deliberately introducing defects into printed titanium. Why? Because using a post-print treatment of heat and pressure they can turn those defects into assets, leading to a stronger and more ductile printed part.

  The most common ways to print metal use powders melted together and this leads to tiny pores in the material which weakens the final product. Using Ti-6Al-4V the researchers deliberately made a poor print that had more than the usual amount of defects. Then they applied extreme heat and pressure to the resulting piece. The pressure caused the pores to close up, and changed the material’s internal structure to be more like a composite.

• Know Audio: A Mess Of Cables | Hackaday

  We’ve now spent several months in this series journeying through the world of audio, and along the way we’ve looked at the various parts of a Hi-Fi system from the speaker backwards to the source. It’s been an enjoyable ride full of technical detail and examining Hi-Fi myths in equal measure, but now it’s time to descend into one of the simplest yet most controversial areas of audio reproduction. Every audio component, whether digital or analogue, must be connected into whatever system it is part of, and this is the job of audio cables, sometimes referred to as interconnects. They are probably the single component most susceptible to tenuous claims about their performance, with audiophiles prepared to spend vast sums on cables claimed to deliver that extra bit of listening performance. Is there something in it, or are they all the same bits of wire with the expensive ones being a scam? Time to take a look.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Oracle Linux 8.5 now available through the Microsoft Store | Windows Central

    Lovers of Linux have a new option to use on Windows PCs. Oracle Linux 8.5 recently launched through the Microsoft Store, allowing developers, IT admins, and enterprise users to run another Linux distribution on their PCs. Oracle Linux 8.5 installs through the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which is available on both Windows 11 and Windows 10.

  • Oracle Linux appears somewhere unexpected: The Windows Store

    On the last day of January, Oracle Linux 8.5, the current version of Big Red’s RHEL-alike, quietly appeared on the Windows Store.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • CIQ Provides Commercial Enterprise Services for Apptainer

        Singularity, the container that powers HPC, has been moved into the Linux Foundation and renamed to Apptainer, and CIQ is here to help with the transition

      • Alpha-Omega Project Launched to Improve Open Source Software Security

      • OpenSSF Announces The Alpha-Omega Project to Improve Software Supply Chain Security for 10,000 OSS Projects

      • Standard electric charging

        It’s become an LF Energy project, Shuli Goodman, Linux Foundation Energy’s Executive Director, explained because, “At LF Energy, we firmly believe that only open source has the speed and transformative power to change industries fast. Our mission is to decarbonize the global economy by enabling the transformation of power systems, the transition to electric mobility, and the radical efficiency of the built environment. In this regard, EVerest is the perfect addition to our ecosystem.”

  • Security

    • New SureMDM Vulnerabilities Could Expose Companies to Supply Chain Attacks

      A number of security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in 42 Gears’ SureMDM device management solution that could be weaponized by attackers to perform a supply chain compromise against affected organizations.

      Cybersecurity firm Immersive Labs, in a technical write-up detailing the findings, said that 42Gears released a series of updates between November 2021 and January 2022 to close out multiple flaws affecting both the platform’s Linux agent and the web console.

    • New Malware Used by SolarWinds Attackers Went Undetected for Years [Ed: Microsoft-connected CrowdStrike once again attacking Linux, trying to twist a Microsoft issue as (somehow) a “Linux” thing]

      According to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which detailed the novel tactics adopted by the Nobelium hacking group last week, two sophisticated malware families were placed on victim systems — a Linux variant of GoldMax and a new implant dubbed TrailBlazer — long before the scale of the attacks came to light.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Wanna go to a public school? Tell Google! | Stop at Zona-M

        (*) the official explanation that Pinassi received for the presence of Google Analytics would be that “it is exclusively aimed at logging for reasons of security of the access operations” and that (this is the best part IMHO) “it does not record and use any user tracking data” In other words, it is not clear what is it used for, period.

Environment

• Energy

  • Electric cars are not middle class? That’s bad, IF…

    Carlos Tavares, CEO of the automaker giant Stellantis, is quite skeptical, and worried too, about the real benefits of electric cars. In a recent interview Tavares made two main critiques, both aimed at ecological benefits of electric cars, and above all against what he described as a forced push, by many governments, to buy electric instead of traditional cars with internal combustion engines (ICE).

  • Underwater Tanks Turn Energy Storage Upside-Down | Hackaday

    Pumped hydro storage is one of the oldest grid storage technologies, and one of the most widely deployed, too. The concept is simple – use excess energy to pump a lot of water up high, then run it back through a turbine when you want to get the energy back later.

    With the rise in renewable energy deployments around the world, there is much interest in finding ways to store energy from these often-intermittent sources. Traditional pumped hydro can help, but there is only so much suitable land to work with.

    However, there could be a solution, and it lurks deep under the waves. Yes, we’re talking about underwater pumped hydro storage!

Finance

• Kazakhstan dispels a big myth behind Bitcoin

  It seems that the recent riots in Kazakhstan are due at least parts of them is strictly linked to the “mining” processes of the cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. On one side, it seems that the arrival in Kazakhstan of many Bitcoin mining datacenters forced to leave China has increased the overall energy consumption of the whole country enough to push the government to raise energy prices, which in turn contributed to cause the riots.

  [...]

  Regardless of how things will end up in Kazakhstan, and sincerely wishing the best to all Kazakh people… the specific effect of the riots that I summarized above is great. Maybe Bitcoin or its successors will save the world, or maybe they wont. That is another issue.

  In both cases, the effects on Bitcoin of the riots in a place many “First World” residents could not locate on a map if their life depended on it are another wonderful, perfect reminder that there is no separate “cyberspace”. There is no digital utopia where digitally savvy people live and trade, untouched by the miseries of the one, real world. We are all in this together, with or without cryptocurrencies.

• When data favour the rich | Stop at Zona-M

  Lies, damn lies and socioeconomical indicators.

  A recent post by Filippo Celata presents a textbook example of how and why data are not neutral and, regardless of their quality, can tell stories very far froom reality if one just accepts them as they are, without further judgment.

  On December 31st, 2021 the italian government published the decree that assigns the COVID recovery funds specifically allocated for urban regeneration projects. Celata explains clearly how and why those assignments do not really match local needs.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The web of power that has less masters every year | Stop at Zona-M

  Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are weaving what I would call a worrying “Fiber-Optic Web of Power”. Here is why you should be worried too.

  [...]

  Whatever answer you give to the question above, one thing is certain: the oceans of the world are becoming more and more digital every year, first at the (privatized!) data level and now at the physical level, thanks exactly to the (privatized, again!) cables that run on their floors. This is even less reassuring, when you also consider how fragile, that is needy of really effective and transparent supervision, those cables really are: we are talking about stuff highly vulnerable to anyone that could “deploy underwater submersibles to destroy them”.

Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Portrait of a Scaphander – The Public Domain Review

    Brad Fox tells a history-story that follows the fuzzy logics we associate with a “shaggy dog”. An aquatic dog? Maybe. The sea bends everything — even light.

Desktop/Laptop

• How I switched to Ubuntu after using Windows for 20 years (the 2022 guide) | by Dmitrii Eliuseev | Jan, 2022 | Medium

  I was a Windows user for many years, but after buying a new computer I decided to use Ubuntu as the main OS.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • First Blog Post for SoK 2022!

    As a painter who also likes software development, I first came across Krita when I was looking for digital painting applications on Windows. Later on, I learned about open source and decided to start contributing as a way to build my development skills while working on something that I myself use. I spent the last few months of 2020 building Krita, first in Windows (a nightmare :P), then in Linux, and started learning Qt since I was already familiar with some basic C++ from school.

  • AMD HIP Linux GPU Acceleration For Blender Delayed To v3.2 Release – Phoronix

    Last year Blender 3.0 added AMD HIP acceleration to its Cycles X render code with OpenCL having been removed. That AMD HIP support for Blender 3.0 was limited to Windows with plans to then enable Linux support for Blender 3.1. Sadly due to AMD driver delays, that HIP Linux support is postponed to Blender 3.2.

    Blender 3.1 is due to be released in March and sadly will be lacking AMD HIP support on Linux.

  • Intel Patches To Make It Easier To Run Their Discrete Graphics On Arm, Other Architectures – Phoronix

    A change currently being evaluated for Intel’s “i915″ Linux kernel graphics driver would make it easier for building driver support for their forthcoming discrete graphics products for targeting other non-x86 CPU architectures like Arm

    Sent out today as a “request for comments” were patches that change the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver to allow it to optionally build without support for integrated graphics — leaving the driver just capable of discrete graphics support. While Intel graphics have traditionally been about their integrated graphics on their processors, Intel is moving hard and fast on bringing up their discrete graphics support under Linux with DG2/Alchemist for Intel Arc graphics cards coming together as well as their Xe HPC accelerator.

  • NVIDIA 510.47.03 Linux Driver Released With Vulkan 1.3 Support, RTX 3050 Compatibility – Phoronix

    While it was just yesterday NVIDIA released the 470.103.01 Linux driver, today they have made public the 510.47.03 Linux driver as their first stable version in the NVIDIA 510 Linux driver series.

    This is the stabilized version from their prior NVIDIA 510 Linux beta that brought Vulkan dynamic rendering, AV1 VDPAU decode support, and a variety of other updates predominantly driven by Vulkan API improvements. There is also improved GBM API support for what was originally introduced in the 495 driver series.

Benchmarks

• NVIDIA Linux Gaming Performance For Wayland vs. X.Org On Ubuntu 22.04

  
  With NVIDIA’s newly-introduced 510 Linux driver series paired with the latest XWayland and a modern Wayland compositor like the newest GNOME/Mutter packages, the NVIDIA (X)Wayland experience is in great shape and delivering comparable performance to a traditional X.Org session. The NVIDIA Wayland support with GBM usage has stabilized and appears to be in good shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are some benchmarks of the NVIDIA 510 driver on the current state of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

  In the past we’ve looked at the Radeon Linux gaming performance for X.Org vs. Wayland. Modern Wayland support in the likes of KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell have worked out well with that open-source Radeon driver stack. Now with the latest NVIDIA drivers, their Wayland support is in good shape too.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to install Oracle Solaris 11.4

  Some time ago, I wrote an article on how to install OmniOS CE on VirtualBox. OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, which is based on (now discontinued) OpenSolaris, which was based on Oracle Solaris.

  For this article I’m going back to the “source” to show how to install Oracle Solaris 11.4, screen by screen. Last year I’ve switched from VirtualBox (also from Oracle) to gnome-boxes, but the general procedure should be pretty similar to any VM system. Anyway, to use in production, a real server would do better.

• Convert PDF To EPUB In Linux – OSTechNix

  In this modern era, everything is digitized. The E-Books have became mainstream. EBooks are available in various formats such as PDF, EPUB, MOBI, AZW3 and IBA Etc. Most e-Book readers does support almost all formats. However, some e-Book reader may not support a specific format. For example, ASW3 files will only be viewed by Amazon Kindle. In such cases, we need to convert the e-Books from one format to another supported format. In this quick tutorial, we will see how to easily convert EBooks from PDF to EPUB format (and vice versa) in Linux.

  There are many online and offline applications exists to convert an EBook from one format to another. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be using Calibre e-book suite, which let us to convert ebooks from both CLI and via GUI.

• How To Install RethinkDB server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal fossa

  RethinkDB is an open-source NoSQL database for production use, it is meant to simplify the creation and scaling of real-time applications. This distributed NoSQL database intended for storing schemaless JSON documents

  Although MongoDB is already quite popular in the field of NoSQL databases, however, MongoDB lags behind Cassandra, CouchDB, or Riak in terms of scalability. Well, this means RethinDB has to compete with all of them, well it already trying to provide ease of usage like MongoDB with good scalability.

• How To Install Terraform on Fedora 35 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Terraform on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files. Terraform is built by Hashicorp and released under Mozilla Public License. It supports public, private as well as hybrid cloud, as of now Terraform supports 145 providers, which includes popular providers like AWS, Azure cloud, GCP, Oracle cloud, and many others.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Terraform on a Fedora 35.

• How to install KDE Plasma on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish

  There was a time when KDE was considered as a resource binger Desktop UI but not anymore, it is similar to Gnome in terms of performance but with a much beautiful interface and wide range of applications. It comes already comes as a default GUI in many Linux systems such as OpenSUSE, MX Linux, Kubuntu among others. The main focus here is on the many customization options.

  Although the KDE desktop is beautiful, a bit more confusing at first glance, however as you start using the same, it is very reminiscent of Windows with its taskbar. This also contains the “Activity Manager” with which different desktop versions can be displayed, for example, to access a photo collection directly. The display of windows or the positioning of widgets – almost every element of the user interface can be customized in KDE. However, the variety of options can quickly overwhelm inexperienced users. You should therefore invest some time in your very own KDE experience.

  Also, the applications from the KDE community are a lot more extensive and, like the KDE desktop, with a wide range of setting options. Great for power users, unfortunately often too overloaded for newcomers.

• DNS RPZ: A DNS Firewall to filter Sites and Users

  Hello flocks, today we are going to learn some DNS stuffs. We all know about what’s a DNS, how DNS works, its types, etc. So, wrap things up and let’s dive into our today’s topic about DNS Response Policy Zone (RPZ).

  [...]

  DNS Response Policy Zone (RPZ) is a DNS zone which enables DNS administrators to customize policy in DNS servers, so that the server returns modified answers to Client’s DNS queries. In other words, RPZ provides a way to alter a DNS response in real time. It can be used to modify potentially unsafe DNS Data to block communication or provide local data to redirect to a “walled garden”. As we can alter query response or block any domain using RPZ it is also known as DNS firewall.

• Grep Command Cheat Sheet With Examples [Free PDF Download]

  Grep is a powerful UNIX command that lets you search inside the file contents on a variety of parameters. It’s specially helpful when you are troubleshooting or debugging.

  The grep command has a huge number of options and use cases. You probably will never need or use all of them. However, you’ll end up using a handful of grep commands most of the time.

  This article lists the most common grep commands with quick examples. Linux Handbook already has a detailed article on grep, so I won’t go in depth here. I’ll just the common options and their explanation here.

• Increment and Decrement Variables in Bash – ByteXD

  A variable is a placeholder that is used to store any numerical or text value so that it can be used during the execution of a computer program. It is normally used in computer programming languages, but you can also use it in Bash scripts.

  In this tutorial, you will learn about increment and decrement variables and different ways of incrementing and decrementing variables in Bash scripts.

  In traditional programming languages, there is a proper syntax to define a variable. Also, you have to specify the well-known data type (integer, float, char, etc.) that defines the type of value the variable would contain and allocates memory for it accordingly.

Games

• CodeWeavers advertising for a Wine developer and Linux gaming tester | GamingOnLinux

  Looking for a job in the Linux space? Now is your chance! CodeWeavers, the company that sponsors development on the Wine compatibility layer and works with Valve on Steam Play Proton are hiring again.

  Similar to one they offered before is a “General Wine Developer”. This position needs a programmer to hack away on open source to improve Wine’s ability to run games and all sorts of other software. CodeWeavers say there’s multiple positions available here between working on their own CrossOver UI, Proton for Valve and various other CodeWeavers’ stuff. One of the key points though is you cannot have had exposure to Microsoft code or reverse-engineering of Microsoft software, as everything Wine related has to be totally clean-room.

• Cyberpunk adventure Technobabylon gets a modern native Linux build | GamingOnLinux

  Wadjet Eye Games and Technocrat Games have returned with a fresh upgrade of Technobabylon, a 2015 cyberpunk adventure. This follows on from updates / new Linux ports of Unavowed, Gemini Rue and The Blackwell Bundle.

• Steam announces changes to sales for devs, next set of sale dates up | GamingOnLinux

  For developers, the time they have to wait between running sales has been decreased. Instead of having to wait six weeks between sales, they now only have to wait four (28 days). Although, this rule does not apply to the four most major site-wide sales being the Lunar New Year, Summer, Autumn, and Winter sales. Valve are also provided developers with a new tool to manage participating in sale events, where developers get a centralized area to see all the events their games qualify to be included in. Sounds pretty useful.

• Total War: WARHAMMER III gets a nice long official Let’s Play video | GamingOnLinux

  We don’t yet know the exact date of the Linux version, with it coming “as close to launch day as possible” with the main release date being February 17.

• If you still don’t own Stellaris it’s currently free with Amazon Prime Gaming | GamingOnLinux

  Quick tip – GOG and Amazon Prime Gaming have teamed up to give subscribers an offer they can’t refuse – another free game! Get a copy of Stellaris from Paradox Interactive / Paradox Development Studios.

  How to get it? Easy. Just head over to Prime Gaming and click the Games header, then you will see that you can redeem Stellaris on GOG. The offer is open until March 1 and the deal is open to any region that is available with GOG, so you should be good to go. Always nice to get another free game and Stellaris is one where you can happily sink 100s of hours into even without any DLC.

• Valheim getting Steam Deck tweaks, more new content teased | GamingOnLinux

  Valheim, absolutely one of the best games available natively for Linux is going to get some upgrades for the Steam Deck.

• First big Jump in Steam Deck Verified Games

  Today marks the first time where the Steam Deck Verified and Playable games are listed at a much faster rate – nothing like what we have seen in the past week. Just in the past 24 hours since our last refresh, 56 titles have been added in total, bringing the current status to…

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE’s Falkon Browser Adds Screen Capture and PDF Reader with its Latest Update in 3 Years

    If you’re a KDE fan, you must have certainly come across or even used Falkon. So, you must be pleasantly surprised to find out that KDE has managed to release a new major upgrade of their web browser.

    Unlike other mainstream web browsers, Falkon does not receive frequent updates. And, the latest release is an exciting update, after a gap of almost three years!

    For those unaware, Falkon is a simple open-source web browser built upon the QtWebEngine. It was initially known as QupZilla, later rebranded to Falkon under KDE.

Distributions

• FSF-Tailored Trisquel 10.0 Released – Adds 32-bit Arm, Defaults To GNU Linux-Libre 5.4 – Phoronix

  Trisquel 10.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest major release of this operating system that is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. While it has the blessing of the FSF, it’s a bit behind on the software feature front.

  Trisquel 10.0 is the FSF-endorsed distribution’s rebase to… Ubuntu 20.04 lTS. Two years after the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and two months ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Trisquel 10.0 is now onto this Ubuntu long-term support release. Trisquel 10.0 for meeting the free software requirements defaults to using the GNU Linux-Libre 5.4 kernel by default, which is also a bit unfortunate for a 2022+ distribution considering all of the improvements since in recent kernels. There is though 5.8 and 5.13 based GNU Linux-libre builds available within Trisquel 10.0 as alternatives but surprisingly not any option based on Linux 5.15 LTS.

  Besides migrating to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base, Trisquel 10.0 adds initial support for ARM devices. However, that’s an “armhf” target. Next the project will be working towards 64-bit Arm and POWER architecture support. They did drop 32-bit x86 support though with Trisquel 10.

• Trisquel GNU/Linux 10.0 “Nabia” Is Here with Support for ARM Devices

  The Trisquel team released Trisquel GNU/Linux 10.0 “Nabia” and we’re going to take a look at it today.

  Very few Linux distros have the privilege of being endorsed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). One of those distros is Trisquel GNU/Linux.

  You can be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Trisquel. It is an Ubuntu-based desktop oriented distro which features free and open source software exclusively. This means that there is no closed source proprietary software of any kind included in this distro. That includes the kernel, all the apps, all the libraries, drivers, everything.

  Keep in mind that if you wanted to go out and get proprietary drivers, Trisquel doesn’t provide any easy tools for you to use to get those proprietary drivers. Certainly, you’re not gonna like spending a ton of money on that high-end Nvidia graphics card and then having to run the nouveau drivers.

• EasyOS

  • EasyOS version 3.3 released

  • EasyOS Dunfell-series 3.3

    EasyOS was created in 2017, derived from Quirky Linux, which in turn was derived from Puppy Linux in 2013. Easy is built in woofQ, which takes as input binary packages from any distribution, and uses them on top of the unique EasyOS infrastructure.
    Throughout 2020, the official release for x86_64 PCs was the Buster-series, built with Debian 10.x Buster DEBs.
    EasyOS has also been built with packages compiled from source, using a fork of OpenEmbedded (OE). Currently, the Dunfell release of OE has been used, to compile two sets of binary packages, for x86_64 and aarch64.
    The latter have been used to build EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, and first official release, 2.6.1, was in January 2021.
    The page that you are reading now has the release notes for EasyOS Dunfell-series on x86_64 PCs, also debuting in 2021.
    Ongoing development is now focused on the x86_64 Dunfell-series. The last version in the x86_64 Buster-series is 2.6.2, on June 29, 2021, and that is likely to be the end of that series. Releases for the Pi4 Dunfell-series are still planned but very intermittent.
    The version number is for EasyOS itself, independent of the target hardware; that is, the infrastructure, support-glue, system scripts and system management and configuration applications.
    The latest version is becoming mature, though Easy is an experimental distribution and some parts are under development and are still considered as beta-quality. However, you will find this distro to be a very pleasant surprise, or so we hope.

  • Should EasyOS be shipped as an uncompressed image file?

    The upcoming Easy 3.3 will be a 616MB download, compressed .img.gz file.

    However, if I was to build it with a 4MB second partition, and not compress the file, the .img file will be 1 + 639 + 4 +1 equals 645MB. Those 1MB at start and end are padding.

    Then there will be no need to uncompress the file, just one click to open it. But, I don’t know if this is really such a big issue, might put it on the back burner. Reconsider sometime later.

  • More exotic cross-compile path fixing

  • Hack to fix OE cross-compile paths

    This topic is somewhat esoteric, of interest to developers only. The OpenEmbedded cross-compile environment can cause some unexpected side-effects when the executables are run in the target system.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Cockpit Project: Cockpit 262

  • Technical debt lessons from the pandemic | The Enterprisers Project

    If your technology organization is like most, the volume of requests you receive can outpace your ability to keep up with the architecture you need to support innovation and growth. Over time, this situation can cause technical debt, hindering responsiveness and speed to market.

    Like many organizations, our company faced challenges during the pandemic that left us with the burden of technical debt. Here’s how we responded to come out ahead.

  • Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards 2021: And the regional winners are…

    In our previous post we shared the names of the winners of Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards across three categories: Open Transformation, Cloud Native, and Hybrid Cloud.

    The awards were launched in July 2021 in collaboration with Intel and IDC with the goal of identifying innovative and transformative digital leaders using Red Hat technologies and services. The awards shine a spotlight on the innovations of our customers, while focusing on the business value and impact of their projects.

    Philip Carter, group vice president, European chief analyst and WW C-Suite tech research lead at IDC said: “With close to 120 applications, we were able to capture and showcase unique use cases of technology and share some of the best practices for making projects a success.

    We had the pleasure of reviewing many successful practices across industries in EMEA, from large blue chip organisations to local heroes, all of whom provided incredible insights into their projects and operations.”

  • The State of Customer Experience at Red Hat: Technical support and subscription management enhancements

    In the first post of our three-part series, we discussed enhancements made to several Red Hat products and product documentation based on customer feedback in the past year. In this post, we’ll look at some additional areas where we have been working to improve the experience we deliver to customers and partners.

    Other areas that we have made improvements to based on what we’ve heard from our customers. Let’s take a look at some of the enhancements we made to the areas of support delivery and subscription management.

  • Protect secrets in Git with the clean/smudge filter | Red Hat Developer

    When working on public Git repositories, you need to pay close attention so that you don’t accidentally push secret information such as tokens, private server addresses, personal email addresses, and the like. One of the tools that can help you is Git’s clean/smudge filter.

  • Edge computing strategy: 5 potential gaps to watch for | The Enterprisers Project

    In financial terms, edge has already arrived: IDC predicts that companies will spend $176 billion on edge computing worldwide this year, roughly a 15% increase from 2021.

    Ultimately, that’s just a (big) number. There may be more qualitative signs of edge computing’s maturation in terms of architectural approaches, technical capabilities, enterprise use cases, security tactics, and more.

    “Even if we see echoes of older architectures in certain edge computing deployments, we also see developing edge trends that are genuinely new, or at least quite different from what existed previously,” Gordon Haff, technology evangelist at Red Hat, wrote recently in his analysis of edge trends to watch in 2022. “And they’re helping IT and business leaders solve problems in industries ranging from telco to automotive, for example, as both sensor data and machine learning (ML) data proliferates.”

    IT leaders don’t often tackle business problems without a plan, which is why edge strategies – and related categories like IoT and machine learning – figure prominently on their roadmaps. In Red Hat’s 2022 Global Tech Outlook report, for example, 61% of respondents reported plans to run IoT or edge workloads (or both) in the next 12 months.

• Debian Family

  • How to install Envoy Proxy on Debian 11 – NextGenTips

    Envoy is an L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large modern service-oriented architecture. The project was born out of the belief that the network should be transparent to applications. When network and applications problems occur, it should be easy to determine the source of the problem.

    Envoy is an open-source edge and service proxy, designed for cloud-native applications. Let’s dive in and learn how to install Envoy on Debian 11.

  • Ben Hutchings: CI for the Debian kernel team

    Starting just after Christmas, I have been working on CI for all the kernel team’s packages on Salsa. The salsa-ci-team has done great work on producing a common pipeline that is usable for most packages with minimal configuration. However, for some packages a lot more work was required.

  • Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January 2022

    In January I was assigned 24 hours of work by Freexian’s Debian LTS initiative. I worked 16 hours, and will carry over the remaining time to February.

    I sent various backported security fixes for Linux to the stable mailing list, and they have been included in subsequent stable releases. I rebased the linux package on the latest 4.9-stable release, but did not yet upload it.

  • Which version of Debian consumes less RAM ? – LinuxStoney

    Among the many Linux distributions that we can get our hands on today, Debian is one of the most loved and used for different reasons. Many users install it not only for its functionality, but also for its interface and external appearance.

    For many, this is an alternative that is not suitable for users with little experience in Linux environments, but it is also true that it has improved a lot in recent years. Little by little it has been adapting to all types of users and devices, hence its growth and acceptance by the majority. Debian is an open source operating system valid for both corporate environments and end users. Of course, depending on the capabilities of our computer, we can customize the behavior of the software .

    Although in most cases these Linux distributions are prepared to work smoothly on somewhat more limited computers, we must also take some precautions. Generally, the most modern versions of Windows have higher demands than Linux systems, hence precisely one of its attractions. This is something that refers directly to the consumption that the system makes of both the CPU and the RAM memory of the computer.

    Precisely because of all this that we are telling you and if you have made the decision to download and install Debian on your PC, we are going to focus on the resource consumption section. More specifically, we are going to talk about the version of this Linux that consumes less RAM . It is evident that all this will be useful in the event that you have an old PC or a somewhat limited one in terms of internal specifications.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux Arcade Cab Gives Up Its Secrets Too Easily | Hackaday

  Sometimes reverse engineering embedded systems can be a right old faff, with you needing to resort to all kinds of tricks such as power glitching in order to poke a tiny hole in the armour, giving you an way in. And, sometimes the door is just plain wide open. This detailed exploration of an off-the-shelf retro arcade machine, is definitely in that second camp, for an unknown reason. [Matthew Alt] of VoidStar Security, took a detailed look into how this unit works, which reads as a great introduction to how embedded Linux is constructed on these minimal systems.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Ultimate Raspberry Pi Computer Build – Water Cooled CM4 with NVMe SSD – The DIY Life

    If you’ve been following my projects for a while then you’re probably aware that I like to do unnecessary things, like building a water-cooled Raspberry Pi cluster, or this desktop version of a water-cooled Pi. As cool as these may look, they’re not all that practical, so today we’re going to build something that is a little more practical, although is still a bit unnecessary.

    We’re going to build the ultimate water-cooled Raspberry Pi desktop computer and try to give it all of the bells and whistles, including front-facing USB ports, a power button, an OLED stats display and an NVME SSD.

    I’m going to be using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, or CM4 for short, for this build so that I can use the CM4 IO Board for a number of features which we’ll get into in a bit.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • The Google One VPN for Android just got a little safer – Android Authority

  • Google bans nasty Android app! If you’ve downloaded it, delete it now | Express.co.uk

  • Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 review

  • The best chemistry apps for Android – Android Authority

  • Best Free Android Apps [February 2022]: 5 Must-Have Apps | NDTV Gadgets 360

  • Sony’s 4K OLED Xperia PRO 5G Android smartphone sees first discount at $500 off – 9to5Toys

  • Fly around your phone with Android’s hidden voice command center | Computerworld

  • How to minimise the risk of smartphone snooping (Android privacy tips) – Cybershack

  • How to clear your Galaxy, Pixel or other Android phone’s cookies and cache – CNET

  • How to Leave a Group Text on Android in 2022

  • You told us: You’re split about plans for an Indian-made Android, iOS rival

    When you think of mobile phone operating systems, Android and iOS probably come to mind. Beyond these two, very few other OSes enter the public discourse. However, the Indian government is considering changing this by creating a rival to these two industry juggernauts.

    But is this a good idea or another fool’s errand that many companies have fallen foul of? Well, we asked our readers this in a recent poll. Here are the results.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• SteveCo: Video from OLF 2021

  I had two talks at OLF in December. I just noticed that videos are up on YouTube for both of them.

• Kiwi TCMS: Kiwi TCMS 11.1

  We’re happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 11.1.

• Open source cloud platform: meet OpenStack

  Are you looking for an open source cloud platform and you don’t know where to start? Are you getting lost in all the independent rankings and cloud platform comparison pages?

  Try OpenStack and get your open source cloud platform up and running today. OpenStack works at any scale: from a single workstation to thousands of nodes and installs in minutes.

  Sounds impossible? Give it a try or continue reading to explore where is it coming from.

• Open Source Apache CloudStack Powers Government Services in India

  A division of the government of India went with the open source Apache CloudStack instead of a public cloud provider to bring services to millions of citizens.

• Apache Month in Review: January 2022

  Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community.

• joinpeertube.org – a free decentralized federated video platform alternative to centralize YouTube Dailymotion Vimeo

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LibreOffice 7.3 Community is better than ever at interoperability

    LibreOffice 7.3 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provides a large number of improvements targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, or exchanging documents between the two office suites.

  • LibreOffice 7.3 Released, This is What’s New

    This release sees a score of improvements aimed at making it easier for users to migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, as well as those who regularly swap documents between the two office suites.

    To this end, LibreOffice devs have spent time developing new features to handle change tracking in tables and text within documents. This, The Document Foundation say will have a “positive impact” on interoperability throughout all Microsoft Office formats.

  • LibreOffice 7.3 Released With Better Interoperability For Microsoft Office Files

    The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.3 as the newest half-year update to this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite.

    LibreOffice 7.3 is introducing support in Writer for hyperlinks attached to shapes, Writer better tracks and indicates changes to text, various performance improvements, Bash-like auto-completion for Calc spreadsheets, a new bullet mode editing feature, and much more. As usual, LibreOffice 7.3 has many import/export improvements to its Microsoft Office DOC, DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX file format handling. The Document Foundation is particularly promoting LibreOffice 7.3′s improved interoperability with Microsoft Office files as one of the key pillars of this release.

  • Compiling LibreOffice with Meson even further

    After building the basics of LO on Windows and macOS the obvious next step is to build all of it. This is just grunt work and quite boring at that actually. I almost got it done apart from the fact that at the end I got lazy and skipped those bits that require weird dependencies (of which more later).

    The end result has approximately 7800 individual compilation and linking steps. It takes about 30 minutes on a 16 core Ryzen 3700X CPU using Windows and Visual Studio. On a 7 year old 4 core Macbook it takes around 3 hours.

    Quite a bit, actually. The most pertinent would be all the configuration files that get installed. There are a lot of them and they need to be exactly right, otherwise the end result fails to start with cryptic error messages, if any. Unlike code compilation there is no easy way to know in advance what should be done or how things should behave. Ideally you’d get help with people who know the innards of the program and all the configgen bits.

  • LibreOffice 7.3 released

    Version 7.3 of the LibreOffice “Community” edition is out. “In addition to the majority of code commits being focused on interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats, there is a wealth of new features targeted at users migrating from Office, to simplify the transition”.

  • Install LibreOffice 7.3 On Ubuntu / Rocky Linux & Fedora | Tips On UNIX

    This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install LibreOffice 7.3 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04, LinuxMint 20.3, Rocky Linux 8, AlamLinux 8, and Fedora 35.

    LibreOffice is open-source software and it is based on OpenOffice.org also an alternative for Microsoft office, unlike others LibreOffice supports lots of tools.

    LibreOffice suite contains the following Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Math

    The Document Foundation today (02-02-2022) has released the newer version of LibreOffice 7.3 and this is the newest half-year update.

• FSFE

  • Welcome to the Matrix: the FSFE now runs its own server

    The FSFE is eager to support its community with diverse Free Software communication channels. We are happy to announce that we have recently added Matrix to this list. After successful beta tests, every FSFE supporter and volunteer can now create their own Matrix account. We will also use our instance for the FSFE’s virtual booth during FOSDEM!

    For over a decade now, the FSFE has been offering an XMPP (also known as Jabber) server as well as a traditional IRC channel for our community to quickly exchange messages. Today we officially open the gates to our new Matrix server, which has been successfully tested for a few months and has a few advantages over XMPP.

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • GNU Guix: Meet Guix at FOSDEM

      As usual, GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM this week-end, February 5th and 6th. Due to the pandemic, FOSDEM takes place on-line for the second year, but we’re confident the wires will be able carry enthusiasm to the homes of the thousands of attendees.

• Programming/Development

  • Qt Allstack I – Setup – KDAB – KDAB on Qt

    Writing mobile apps can be a lot of fun, especially with Qt and QML. But if your background is all about C++ and Qt, writing the entire required stack for a mobile app can be challenging. Adding push notifications, storing information, and having to write that with another language and framework might make you give up. But we got you covered!

  • LLVM/Clang 14 Ends Feature Development With Better C++20 Support, Armv9 Added – Phoronix

    LLVM release manager Tom Stellard has branched the LLVM 14.0 code and that of its sub-projects like Clang within the mono repository. As such, LLVM 14.0 feature development is now over with the main Git branch working towards what will become LLVM 15.0 later this calendar year.

    LLVM 14.0 will now undergo weeks of bug fixing and testing before being released as stable likely in March. A first release candidate is expected later this week while a second release candidate in early March. If all goes well, LLVM 14.0 stable could be out in mid-March at the earliest.

  • Robert Foss: Git Alias function syntax

    A basic example of the git alias function syntax looks like this.

Will A Kettle Filled With Alcohol Boil Dry? | Hackaday

The average home kettle is set up to switch off automatically when water reaches its boiling point. But would a kettle filled with alcohol, which has a significantly lower boiling point, actually turn off? [Steve Mould] set out to find out.

The prediction was that a kettle full of 40% strength vodka would boil dry, as the vodka would evaporate before it actually got to a hot enough temperature to cause the kettle’s cutout mechanism to kick in. The experiment was done outside to minimise the dangers from the ethanol vapor. As it turns out, the vapor from the boiling vodka is about 80% ethanol and just 20% water, so eventually the mixture left in the kettle is mostly water and it boils hot enough to trigger the cutout mechanism.

However, the experiment doesn’t end there. Trying again with 99% ethanol, when the fluid started boiling, the kettle switched off even more quickly. So what’s going on?

Science

• You have a BIG cognitive degradation problem…

  The book is about how and why everyone is losing their capacity for concentration. As one of many examples, Hari describes a couple a couple he met, in front of a tourist attraction, looking at a picture of that attraction on a tablet screen, instead of enjoying the real thing they had around them.

• The first four words you see are… | Stop at Zona-M

  It’s amazing to which lenghts people will go to work for free for the already extremely rich stockholders of social media companies. Yes, the mere act of having and using a social media account today is equivalent to sending money to them. But this is another level.

• Misleading Packaging History: Maybe Double-Check the Label

  A few years ago, I wrote a tweet, which I imagine is shocking to many of you, but this tweet was quite the tweet. It was just five words, attached to an image that highlighted the risks of misleading packaging, and yet, somehow I apparently captured the zeitgeist of clickbait on the internet in 2018. It was, honestly, weird, and it pulled some crazy numbers (while making my phone totally useless for a while). But now that the dust has long settled on that tweet, I got to thinking about the central theme of it: Why do we put up with misleading packaging? And who decides that something is misleading, anyway? Today’s Tedium looks on the other side of the personal pan pizza that is product design.

  [...]

  In a lot of ways, the definition of misleading can be in the eye of the beholder, especially if that beholder knows how to contact a lawyer.

  Let me give you a fairly recent example. Last year, a woman filed a lawsuit, seeking class action status, over branding on a common product that had been sold for decades that she felt was inaccurate? The product? Morningstar Farms veggie burgers. What was her problem? Simply put, she felt that the term “veggie” implied more vegetables than the burgers actually contained. The patties were largely made of wheat and corn syrup.

  Kellogg’s, the makers of these popular patties (which have a history that goes back more than a century), defended itself in court, and won a quick dismissal of the case just last week, after a judge agreed with the cereal-maker that “veggie” was a common way to refer to vegetarian products.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Demand for Rapid Risk Elimination for Linux at Scale Fueled TuxCare’s Meteoric Growth in 2021

    With ever-changing compliance requirements and shrinking timelines to apply security updates, enterprises find themselves in a constant, multipronged race to remain compliant, competitive, and fortified against increasingly sophisticated threat vectors. Live-patching is one way engineering teams can stay ahead of system vulnerabilities without the downtime.

  • Microsoft: Keep your Windows PC online for this long, or it won’t update properly [Ed: You know Microsoft is in for a severe crisis when even Liam Tung (Microsoft booster) admits Windows is a sordid chaotic mess]

  • Security

    • SureMDM bug chain enabled wholesale compromise of managed devices

      Vulnerabilities in SureMDM could have been chained to compromise every device running the popular mobile device management (MDM) platform within a targeted enterprise, security researchers have revealed.

      The vendor, Indian tech firm 42 Gears, has patched the bugs, which led to remote code execution (RCE) via the web console, along with RCE, command injection, hardcoded password, local privilege escalation, and information disclosure flaws affecting the Linux agent.

    • Security updates for Wednesday [LWN.net]

      Security updates have been issued by CentOS (samba), Debian (apache2 and python-django), Fedora (kernel and phpMyAdmin), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), openSUSE (samba), Oracle (nginx:1.20 and samba), Red Hat (cryptsetup, java-1.8.0-ibm, kernel, nodejs:14, rpm, and vim), SUSE (kernel, python-Django, python-Django1, and samba), and Ubuntu (cron).

    • Samba bug may allow code execution as root on Linux machines, NAS devices (CVE-2021-44142) – Help Net Security

      A critical vulnerability (CVE-2021-44142) in Samba, a widely used open source implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) networking protocol, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code as root on affected Samba installations.

      Several updated versions of Samba have been released on Monday, fixing CVE-2021-44142 and two other flaws (1, 2), but since the software is included in most Linux and Unix-like operating systems (including Apple’s macOS and macOS Server), users of those are advised to keep an eye out for specific updates by those developer teams.

    • Tripwire Patch Priority Index for January 2022 | The State of Security

      Tripwire’s January 2022 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities for Apache, Open Source Policy Kit, Adobe, and Microsoft.

    • PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL JDBC 42.3.2/42.2.25 Security update

      A security advisory has been created for the PostgreSQL JDBC driver. The driver provides the facility to instantiate plugin instances based on class names provided via authenticationPluginClassName, sslhostnameverifier, socketFactory, sslfactory, sslpasswordcallback connection properties.

      However, the driver did not verify if the class implements the expected interface before instantiating the class.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Digital Transparency: A Right to Information Report for January 2022

        One of our key areas of work is ensuring that public authorities respect data privacy and engage in practices that will ensure that the right to privacy is protected. We filed 9 RTI requests and 1 first appeal with various authorities this month to ask for information pertaining to newly introduced projects which affect the data privacy of Indian citizens.

        [...]

        Another focus of our work is to ensure that freedom of speech and expression on the internet is protected and that unnecessary censorship does not lead to a chilling effect on people’s fundamental rights. For this, we routinely file RTI requests to demand accountability for instances that may hamper free speech on the internet such as website blocking or internet shutdowns.

        In the last month, we have filed 1 RTI request to demand accountability for violations of free speech on the internet with the National Internet Exchange of India on the notice to seek written approval of NIXI CEO on .in domain registrations.

        We also filed one first appeal with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for their incomplete reply dated 14/01/2022 to our original reply requesting information on the list of publishers to whom communications were sent by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Desktop/Laptop

• System76 Kudu is a Linux laptop with Ryzen 9 5900HX and NVIDIA RTX 3060

  The System76 Kudu is a laptop with a 15.6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel matte display with a 144 H screen refresh rate, an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX 8-core, 16-thread processor, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics. And while most laptops with those specs ship with Windows, the Kudu is designed to run Linux.

  System76 first introduced the laptop earlier this year, and now the Kudu is available for purchase for $1799 and up.

• CutiePi Tablet review: The open-hardware Linux tablet

  Over the last years, we have seen many Linux-powered tablets, all of which developed with different approaches to “openness”. For instance, the PineTab trades performance and a somewhat conservative design for a very low selling price and full Linux support, which made its demand high to the point of becoming essentially impossible to find on the used market. The JingPad offered a modern, premium feel and near-flagship performance, but it is more of a Linux userspace over an Android kernel, and it did not particularly open to third-party projects.

  The CutiePi, on the other hand, seems to hit a sweet spot: it is arguably the most open project among those mentioned, being certified open-hardware (code JP000005) to the point that anyone with a 3D printer, good SMD soldering equipment, and a lot of time on their hands could replicate it entirely at home.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Lock Your Terminal Sessions With Vlock – Invidious

  Vlock is a nifty little program that allows you to lock out your virtual console (tty) session. This is especially useful for Linux machines which have multiple users with access to the console. You can lock your own session(s) while still allowing other users to use the system on other virtual consoles., or lock the entire virtual console display.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • weston 10.0.0

    Weston 10.0.0 has been released! This new version contains a whole
    bunch of new features and improvements. Here are some highlights:
    
    - Add building blocks for color management: color transformations, gamma
      correct blending, color profiles. These are only internal changes invisible
      to users for now, but will allow to enable color management features in a
      future release.
    - Add feedback to linux-dmabuf-unstable-v1, enabling zero-copy scanout in more
      situations.
    - libseat support has been added. It will supersede all launchers in a future
      release.
    - The test suite has been expanded.
    - All example clients have been converted to xdg-shell.
    - Weston can now automatically launch a client after startup.
    - The wl_shell interface, the fbdev backend, and weston-launch are deprecated.
    
    Notes for packagers:
    
    - libdrm 2.4.95, libwayland 1.18.0 and wayland-protocols 1.24 are now required.
    - libpipewire 0.3 is required for the PipeWire remoting plugin.
    - Support for the deprecated wl_shell interface is now disabled by default (it
      will be removed in a future release, re-enable it with the Meson option
      -Ddeprecated-wl-shell=true).
    - Support for the fbdev backend is now deprecated and disabled by default (it
      will be removed in a future release, re-enable it with the Meson option
      -Ddeprecated-backend-fbdev=true). Migrating to KMS is recommended.
    - Support for weston-launch is now deprecated and disabled by default (it will
      be removed in a future release, re-enable it with the Meson option
      -Ddeprecated-weston-launch=true). Systems without systemd can use seatd (or
      seatd-launch) instead.
    - A KMS driver supporting universal planes is now required for the DRM backend.
    
    Thanks to all contributors!
    
    Commit history since RC1 below.
    
    Kenny Levinsen (4):
          meson: Print deprecation warning for weston-launch
          meson: Set weston-launch as disabled by default
          meson: Rename to deprecated-weston-launch
          ci: Enable weston-launch explicitly for test
    
    Simon Ser (2):
          clients/simple-dmabuf-feedback: fix bound global versions
          build: bump to version 10.0.0 for the official release
    
    git tag: 10.0.0
    

  • Wayland’s Weston 10.0 Compositor Released With DMA-BUF Feedback, Libseat Support

    Weston 10.0 has been released as the newest feature update to Wayland’s reference compositor that often works as a proving grounds and compositor showcasing shiny new features for Wayland.

    Arguably most exciting with Weston 10.0 DMA-BUF feedback support is added to allow zero-copy direct scanout in more situations like with hybrid/multi-GPU laptop setups. Other Wayland compositors have also been quick to support the DMA-BUF feedback extension.

Instructionals/Technical

• Ansible playbook to upgrade Ubuntu/Debian servers and reboot if needed

  I realized I’ve never posted this playbook to my blog… I needed to grab it for a project I’m working on, so I figured I’d post it here for future reference.

  Basically, I need a playbook I can run whenever, that will ensure all packages are upgraded, then checks if a reboot is required, and if so, reboots the server. Afterwards, it removes any dependencies no longer required.

• Cascade Layers: First Contact

  Earlier this week I learned about CSS Cascade Layers and now I’m all hyped up because I really like the concept. I’m eager to find out how we can use them to improve and rethink the architecture of our styles.

  I will not explain how CSS Cascade Layers work because Bramus and Stephanie have already done that and they did it much better than I ever could. I just want to get my feet wet and share my first impressions. If you’re new to the topic, read their articles first.

• Read RSS feeds on Mastodon

  My daily routine when it comes to staying informed of what happens in the world is to read RSS feeds from various sources. To do so, I created an account on Feedly and use their iOS App. But I noticed that I often “forget” to launch the app ; whereas I check Mastodon several times a day. So I decided to configure a Bot that will parse my RSS feeds and publish them on my Masto Home page.

• Using an Ansible playbook with an SSH bastion / jump host

  Since I’ve set this up a number of times, but I just realized I’ve never documented it on my blog, I thought I’d finally do that.

  I have a set of servers that are running on a private network. That network is connected to the Internet through a single reverse proxy / ‘bastion’ host.

  But I still want to be able to manage the servers on the private network behind the bastion from outside.

• How I Manage Content With Jekyll

  The problem as I see it is two fold. Firstly, inserting images using HTML is a pain, and there’s no real way of doing anything except adding an alt attribute using Markdown.

  What if you want to add a caption to the image? Or a class? Or make it lazy loading? You’re fresh out of luck if you want to use Markdown, so you will have to revert to good old HTML.

• Install GrandCMS on Ubuntu 20.04 – Make your own blog for free with this CMS!

  GrandCMS is an open source CMS that is based on the OpenCart core. The developer says that he has removed all the commercial stuff and focused on providing an attractive, robust and competent CMS.

  In addition to this, GrandCMS stands out for being very fast and easy to use so in a matter of minutes we can have a new website up and running.

  So it is a good idea to try it out and keep it in mind for personal and private projects.

  Let’s get started.

• How to share files with Samba | Enable Sysadmin

  The Samba project provides file sharing and print services for computers on a network. It uses the Server Message Block and Common Internet File System (SMB/CIFS) protocol, so the services created by running Samba are available to Linux, macOS, and Windows clients. It’s an essential service to run in organizations that support multiple operating systems, and it’s even useful on homogenous networks.

  It’s not difficult to set up, and all you need is at least one server you want to designate as a file-share host (it doesn’t have to be rack mounted and could even be a dedicated workstation). For client access, Samba is either built into the operating system or easily installed from a repository.

• How to install Clonezilla on Ubuntu 21.10 – NextGenTips

  Clonezilla is a suite of open-source, disk cloning programs used for bare metal backup Fand recovery and also used during system deployment. Clonezilla server edition uses multicast technologies to deploy a single image file to a group of computers in a local area network.

  In this tutorial guide, we are going to explore how to install and use Clonezilla on Ubuntu 21.10.

• How To Install Google Chrome 98 In Ubuntu / Rocky Linux & Fedora | Tips On UNIX

  Google Chrome is one of the common and most widely used web browsers in the world. It is blazing fast and easy to use with security features.

  Google Chrome’s newer version is 98 and it is the second web browser update of the year. This release contains changes related to the developer side and some user-impacting differences.

  This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Google Chrome 98 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Linux Mint 20.3, Rocky Linux 8, AlmaLinux 8, and Fedora 35.

• How to Install LAMP Apache, MySQL, PHP on Debian 11

  How to Install LAMP Apache, MySQL, PHP on Debian 11. In this guide you will learn how to install Apache2, MySQL 8.0 and PHP 8.1.

  You will also install some common PHP extensions and adjust the PHP configurations. Finally you will secure your setup with Let’s Encrypt SSL and configure HTTPS redirection.

  This setup is tested on Google cloud, so it will work on all cloud hosting services like AWS, Azure or any VPS or any dedicated servers running Debian 11.

• How to Install OpenNMS Horizon Network Monitoring System on Debian 11

  OpenNMS is a free, open-source, and one of the most powerful network monitoring and network management platforms used for monitoring remote devices from a central location. It supports many functionalities including, Provisioning, Services Monitoring, Event managing, chart support, and more. OpenNMS uses SNMP and JMX and gathers information from remote systems. It runs on Linux and Windows operating systems and provides a web-based interface to easy monitoring.

  In this tutorial, I will show you how to install OpenNMS on Debian 11.

• How to Setup a Kubernetes Cluster with K3S in Rocky Linux 8

  Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains the project. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

  K3S is a certified lightweight kubernetes built for IoT & Edge Computing. K3s is a highly available, certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. K3s is packaged as a single <50MB binary that reduces the dependencies and steps needed to install, run and auto-update a production Kubernetes cluster.

  In this tutorial, we will set up a kubernetes cluster with K3S in Rocky Linux 8.

• How to Use the nmcli Command to Manage NetworkManager

  The nmcli command, available in many Linux variants, is a command-line tool for managing NetworkManager. Using nmcli, a Linux administrator can perform various tasks, such as managing the network connections and displaying the network interface adapter’s status.

Games

• Intel Arc GPUs could raise the bar for gaming on Linux | Windows Central [Ed: Interesting to find it in a site such as this]

  Intel ARC graphics cards look like they’ll have Resizable BAR (ReBAR) support at or near launch. ReBAR technology can boost the frame rate performance of games that support the feature. That list is rather short at the moment, but support for ReBAR would still be nice to see on Intel’s upcoming ARC GPUs.

  A report by Phoronix explains that Intel’s open-source developers are working on Linux driver support. ReBAR support is on the way, according to the notes for the most recent kernel patches (via PC Gamer).

• Left 4 Dead 2 gets updated ready for the Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  Looks like playing Left 4 Dead 2 on the upcoming Steam Deck will be a pretty good experience, with Valve pushing out a fresh update today to be ready for it.

  Part of all titles getting to the status of Verified, gamepad input needs to be rock solid. Not only that, games need to use the correct controller input icons on-screen too. This upgrade for Left 4 Dead 2 brings all that. Valve of course want their own games to be Verified as much as possible too for their own hardware!

• Custom Macintosh With A Real 486 | Hackaday

  Older Apple computers can often be something of a collector’s item, with the oldest fetching an enormously high price in auctions. The ones from the late ’80s and early ’90s don’t sell for quite as much yet, but it’s possible that museums and collectors of the future will one day be clamoring for those as well. For that reason, it’s generally frowned upon to hack or modify original hardware. Luckily, this replica of an Apple Macintosh didn’t harm any original hardware yet still manages to run software on bare metal.

• Arcane: An Exceptional TV Show

  “Hey have you watched Arcane yet?” – “Me: Not yet, heard about it on Reddit. It’s based on League of Legends right? I’ve never played the game.” – “Just watch it NOW.”

  If someone had told me that there was going to be something better than Squid Game to watch on TV in 2021, I’d have laughed. Now I would have the admit they were right. The best TV show of the year 2021, in my opinion, is most certainly Arcane, developed as a collaboration between Riot Games (characters and story) the French studio Fortiche (for the production itself. By the way, Fortiche is a casual word to mean strong, and they earned it). You may be aware that Riot Games’ reputation is not so hot lately, but do not let that detract you from checking out Arcane.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • What a FreeBSD/KDE user misses on macOS

    Ed Maste asked what everyone’s favourite changes were to FreeBSD over the last year. I replied that FreeBSD 13 was a great release for the desktop, and that coupled with KDE even made me miss stuff when I’m working on macOS.

    A few people asked me to expand on what I meant by that. There’s probably nothing surprising here, but here goes: [...]

Distributions

• Tiny Core Linux 13.0 released for older or lower-end x86 hardware

  Tiny Core Linux is a lightweight (~22MB SIO) Linux distribution with an FLTK (Fast Light Toolkit)/FLWM (Fast Light Windows Manager) desktop and based on the Core Project that integrates a recent Linux kernel, vmlinuz, and a root filesystem with low footprint libraries such as busybox. It’s mostly interesting for older or low-end hardware that may be slow and/or unusable with more common Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Debian.

  I’ve quickly tried the 32-bit ISO in VirtualBox and was offered to boot it with a GUI or command line, but an option for slow devices waiting for USB for a period of time. The desktop environment (shown in the first screenshot above) is very basic with just five icons are the bottom. The only application installed is the Terminal, but you can add more including Firefox through the menu.

• New Releases

  • Trisquel GNU/Linux 10.0 “Nabia” Released with GNU Linux-Libre 5.4 Kernel, ARM Support

    Trisquel GNU/Linux continues to keep the spirit of free software alive in 2022 and the new release promises an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) based computer operating system that doesn’t include any proprietary software or firmware and uses the GNU Linux-libre 5.4 LTS kernel rather than Ubuntu’s Linux 5.4 LTS kenel.

    Dubbed “Nabia,” Trisquel GNU/Linux 10.0 is here more than 15 months after Trisquel GNU/Linux 9.0 “Etiona” with new releases of its privacy-oriented software, including Abrowser 96.0 web browser and Icedove 91.5.0 email, calendar and news client as rebranded versions of the Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird apps.

  • Linux Lite 5.8 Release Includes Neofetch, Updated Theme, and New Wallpapers – It’s FOSS News

    One of the best Windows-like distribution and lightweight distros out there, Linux Lite is an impressive choice for modern computers and old systems.

    And, to improve the experience, finally, Linux Lite 5.8 is here!

    The latest release includes a host of changes in terms of UI, with performance tweaks and bug fixes.

• BSD

  • GoT all the things

    Hola, I was basically using cvs for a long time for OpenBSD and some Github for open source projects, until this thread on ports made me decide to just move all my repos to GoT, which I had the privilege to see an early version long time ago in a hackthon :).

    So my setup is pretty easy and I will explain the “migration” and how to keep in sync my “new” GoT repos with upstream providers such as Codeberg, Sourcehut and Github.

  • FreeBSD 13 on Thinkpad T460s

    For some reasons, I decided to use FreeBSD on my laptop. Several times have I tried it in the last few years. Several times have I stopped after the first issue that I felt was sign of it not being built for me.

    This time, I’ll go for at least a whole month of using it. So I can really decide if I keep using it ; or switch back to OpenBSD.

• Arch Family

  • First Arch Linux ISO Powered by Linux Kernel 5.16 Is Now Available for Download

    Arch Linux 2022.02.01 is now available for download and it comes pre-installed with Linux 5.16 as default kernel for new installations and system rescue/recovery tasks. The ISO image includes Linux kernel 5.16.4, but it looks like Linux kernel 5.16.5 was also released today and you should expect it to land in the stable archives by the end of the week.

    In addition to the new kernel, the Arch Linux 2022.02.01 snapshot incorporates all the updated packages and security patches that have been released through the distribution’s software repositories during the month of January 2022.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • [Old] CentOS Linux 8 will reach End of Life on December 31, 2021. Here’s what that means.

    Additionally, with this deadline falling during a time when many of our team, as well as many of our users, will be out of the office, we intend to bend the usual EOL process by keeping this content available until January 31st.

• Debian Family

  • Full 64-bit Official Raspberry Pi OS Now Generally Available

    
    Until today, Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) was available only as a 32-bit operating system for all Raspberry Pi models, from Raspberry Pi 1 to the latest Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. This is was the recommend version offered by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, due to compatibility issues and to avoid customer confusion.

    During the past few months, since April 2021, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a beta release of a full 64-bit version of their Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS, which is now finally out of beta testing and ready for mass deployment.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Celebrate Black history this month with code!

  • Some Small Updates

    Hi everyone! The X2100 BIOS has been updated and the only change is the GPIO voltage for the Intel_HDA pin. The change from 3.3v to 1.8v should mitigate/eliminate EC issues with new motherboards (<100hrs of power up time). Huge thanks to jwise once again for his contributions.

  • Silicon die teardown: a look inside an early 555 timer chip

    Eric Schlaepfer (@TubeTimeUS) recently came across the chip above, with a mysterious part number. He tediously sanded through the epoxy package to reveal the die (below) and determined that the chip is a 555 timer. Signetics released the 555 timer in mid-1972 4 and the chip below has a January 1973 date code (7304), so it must be one of the first 555 timers. Curiously, it is not labeled 555, so perhaps it is a prototype or internal version.3 I took detailed die photos, which I discuss in this blog post.

  • It’s dire: Raspberry Pi availability tracker is launched

    André has tried including all the official Pi vendors (who contractually will sell Pi models at MSRP and not the insane markups you’ll find on eBay or Amazon), but some block script-based access, so only about half the vendors are currently accounted for.

    Checking yesterday, two models were available—across all the 29 models tracked. And today that number’s down to one, a lonely CM4 model with 2 GB of RAM, 32 GB eMMC storage, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

  • Soldering Workbench Tour

    Over the past couple of years I have been upgrading the soldering equipment that I used to mostly repair Amigas and build new Amiga parts. Today I’m going to go through what I use and why I decided to purchase each one. The hope is that will help people trying to make similar purchasing decisions in the future.

    I have a workshop with a 6 meter kitchen counter on it and my soldering section takes up half that counter. I’m going to go from right to left in this post.

  • LTO Tape data storage for Linux nerds

    One of the common reasons to look towards LTO Tape is that it’s much cheaper than hard drives, where a 12TB SATA drive costs around £18.00 per TB (at the time of writing), a LTO-8 tape that has the same capacity costs around £7.40 per TB (at the time of writing). That’s a significant price difference. So, you may ask what is the catch?

  • Learn how to make your old pedal generator work with Zwift | Arduino Blog

    Zwift is a neat cycling simulator app that lets you experience a variety of bicycle adventures from the comfort of your living room. You can participate in bike races, cruise your favorite trails, or go on a leisurely ride through the country. Zwift’s key feature is that it reacts to your pedaling and vice-versa. So an uphill section increases the pedaling difficulty and your in-game speed correlates to your pedaling speed. Gene’s Green Machine found a way to integrate an existing bike with Zwift using Arduino.

    In order for this to work, you will need an indoor bike setup with a pedal generator. The generator creates resistance and its voltage output is proportional to the gear ratio and pedaling speed. By monitoring the voltage, you can tell Zwift how fast your virtual bike should move. Conversely, Zwift can adjust the real world pedaling resistance based on the virtual conditions. Steering isn’t a factor here, but that isn’t a major part of cycling at speed anyway. You also don’t get to experience the virtual weather elements, but that is a good thing as far as most people are concerned.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Updating SailfishOS (Suomenlinna)

    Long story short (read this part of the release notes), I decide to remove the packages the updater complains about and a few more.

  • the smart modem

    I think I’ve mentioned occasionally that various devices, mostly cellular modems, just use the Hayes or AT command set. Recently I obtained a GPS tracking device (made by Queclink) that is, interestingly, fully configured via the Hayes command set. It’s an example of a somewhat newer trend of converging the functionality of IoT devices into the modem baseband. But what is this Hayes command set anyway?

  • YouTube for Android rolls out video player redesign – 9to5Google

  • Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Is Near — Don’t Buy a New Android Phone yet

  • Repainter App Lets You Customize Android 12 Theme Colors

  • Nokia 7.2 receiving Android 11 Build update | Nokiamob

  • Android Auto is looking more like CarPlay in new leaked images – The Verge

  • 7 BestPhoto Collage Apps for Android – Phandroid

  • Android app deals of the day: Monopoly, Sheltered, Worms 3, Twilight Pro Unlock, more – 9to5Toys

  • How to sign a document on your Android smartphone

  • The Google One VPN for Android just got a little safer – Android Authority

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• How radical transparency is transforming open source healthcare software

  At Tidepool, where I work as a Community and Clinic Success Manager, the company’s mission is to make diabetes software more accessible, meaningful, and actionable. Operating in the open is how we achieve that. Tidepool’s diabetes management software is an open source platform free for both clinicians and people impacted by diabetes. And, because the company is a nonprofit, it also operates according to the transparency rules that govern 501(c)(3) organizations.

  This approach means that open source healthcare software can be driven by the people most affected by it—in the case of Tidepool, the diabetes community. The solutions that come from this process put the needs of individual users first, from the design phase to implementation.

• Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple Compressor

  
  Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google’s parent), Amazon and Facebook dominate the tech landscape. Their dominance is so broad they account for more than 20% of the S&P 500.

  There are many things to admire about Apple’s hardware and software. Apple make great looking (albeit expensive) hardware. Over the years key successes include the iPhone, iPad, iPod, and the MacBook Air. The company designs its own hardware and software. This gives them the power to make an operating system and suite of apps that are tailor-made and optimized for their hardware. Apple also operates the Apple Music and Apple TV media distribution platforms.

  macOS is Apple’s proprietary operating system for its line of Macintosh computers. Its interface, known as Aqua, is highly polished and built on top of a BSD derivative (Darwin). There’s a whole raft of proprietary applications that are developed by Apple for their operating software. This software is not available for Linux and there’s no prospect of that position changing.

• How open source supports businesses’ impact on climate change | Opensource.com

  In the coming decade, climate changes will compel the creation of new ecological norms and rules for our economy. The financial industry will be at the center of this transition, determining which companies and technologies are granted the resources they need to spearhead this evolution.

  So far, objectively evaluating the ethics and environmental impact of individual businesses has proved challenging. Many currently used metrics make it easy for companies to promote a message of ecological responsibility while continuing unsustainable practices, a discordance sometimes referred to as greenwashing. A movement toward measuring corporate sustainability based on quantitative values, open source practices, and open science can potentially circumvent this threat to economic transformation.

• Events

  • FOSDEM 2022

    The annual FOSDEM conference is kicking off in a matter of days as software developers prepare for thoughtful discussions on the latest open source developments.

    This two-day virtual event is organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software. With over 50 devrooms and nearly 700 talks, this jam-packed weekend is sure to satisfy the most curious of minds.

    Within this rigorous lineup, you’ll have the chance to get an in-depth look at Mobian: an open-source project aimed at bringing Debian GNU/Linux to mobile devices. Presented by Collabora’s very own Arnaud Ferraris, he’ll take you through the significance of the project’s advancements and contributions to the FLOSS ecosystem.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LibreOffice 7.3 Open-Source Office Suite Officially Released, This Is What’s New

    
    As with previous updates in the LibreOffice 7.x series, the LibreOffice 7.3 release is here to further improve document interoperability with proprietary formats from the MS Office suite in an attempt to ease the migration from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

    Highlights include handling of change tracking in tables and when text is moved, which have a positive impact on interoperability with Microsoft Office documents, faster opening of large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files of over 200 pages, improved rendering speed of some complex documents, as well as improvements to import and export filters.

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • GNU findutils 4.9.0 released [Savannah]

      This is to announce findutils-4.9.0, a stable release. 
      See the NEWS below for more details. 
      GNU findutils is a set of software tools for finding files that match 
      certain criteria and for performing various operations on them. 
      Findutils includes the programs "find", "xargs" and "locate". 
      More information about findutils is available at: 
      
      https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/
      
      Please report bugs and problems with this release via the the 
      GNU Savannah bug tracker: 
      
      https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=findutils
      
      Please send general comments and feedback about the GNU findutils 
      package to the mailing list (<mailto:bug-findutils@gnu.org): 
      
      https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-findutils
      
      There have been 35 commits by 6 people in the 55 weeks since 4.8.0: 
        Andreas Metzler (1)     Helge Kreutzmann (1) 
        Andrew Gaul (1)         James Youngman (1) 
        Bernhard Voelker (33)   Renaud Pacalet (1) 
      This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: 
         Autoconf 2.69 
         Automake 1.16.5 
         M4 1.4.18 
         Gnulib v0.1-5153-g6ef3d78333 
      Please consider supporting the Free Software Foundation in its fund 
      raising appeal; see . 
      Thanks to everyone who has contributed! 
      Have a nice day, 
      Bernhard Voelker [on behalf of the GNU findutils maintainers] 
      

    • When is GIMP version 3.0 coming? – LinuxStoney

      Of greater or lesser complexity, almost everyone now has a photo editor installed on their computer. Although Adobe Photoshop is the most popular, we don’t need to go for a solution of that level either. Serve as a clear example of all this, GIMP, a very interesting alternative solution.

      It is not for nothing that these two programs are considered the most popular and used all over the world when it comes to editing our images . However, there is a clear difference between the two. While the giant Adobe’s proposal is a paid program, with GIMP we are faced with a completely free open source project. It is true that for some time now, this program is considered one of Photoshop’s main competitors. However, many consider that, in order to continue on this path, its top managers will speed up some movements.

      With this, what we really mean is that for some time the usual users of this software solution have been waiting for the arrival of GIMP 3.0 . It’s been too many months now that this new version has been talked about, which initially would revolutionize the future of the editor. To date, some test versions have been seen, although it seems that its developers have not made up their minds about its launch. At the moment, the previous versions that are currently on the market continue to be improved. We refer specifically to version 2.1 and later.

• Programming/Development

  • Git 2.34 has changed how you configure fast-forward only pulls and rebasing

    As of Git 2.34, two things have changed. First, the default behavior of ‘git pull’ is now to abort if it can’t fast-forward the upstream into your local branch (ie, ‘git pull –ff-only’); basically, the previous warning has become an error. Second, the configuration setting of ‘pull.ff only’ now takes priority over ‘pull.rebase true’ (although not over an explicit –rebase on the command line). If you have both in a repository with things to rebase, you effectively wind up running ‘git pull –ff-only’, which fails because you have additional local changes that Git thinks would have to be merged. The behavior of ‘pull.ff only’ here may be an accidental bug and is certainly not historical behavior, but we have to deal with the Git release we get, not the one we’d like.

  • Regexes are Cool and Good

    No, where regex really shines is in interactive use. When you’re trying to substitute in a single file you have open, or grep a folder, things like that. Readability doesn’t matter because you’re writing a one-off throwaway, and fragility is fine because you’re a human-in-the-loop. If anything goes wrong you will see that and tweak the regex.

  • A thesis: most websites are implicitly designed with a short lifetime

    I don’t think people building websites explicitly think about the expected lifetime and plan for whatever specific lifetime they expect (at least, not usually). But I do think it influences what technologies they consider and choose, and in particular I think people are influenced by a general feeling that no matter what they do, it’s probably not lasting for all that long. Or, to put things another way, they won’t be stuck with what they’ve built for all that long, left to operate and maintain it no matter what. Something will change enough to force changes regardless of what they do.

  • Fortran newsletter: February 2022

    Welcome to the February 2022 edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.

  • Perl/Raku

    • A brief guide to perl character encoding

      I originally wrote this at work, after my team spent far too many days yelling at the computer because of Mojibake. Thanks to my employer for allowing me to publish it, and the several colleagues who provided helpful feedback. Any errors are, naturally, not their fault.

  • Rust

    • Arti 0.0.4 is released: Refactoring, rustls, and more!

      Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s nowhere near ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.

      We’re working towards our 0.1.0 milestone in early March, where our main current priorities are stabilizing our APIs, and resolving issues that prevent integration. We’re planning to do releases every month or so until we get to that milestone.

    • Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

      There is only drama in the open source community when the day has a “y” in it, and sure enough a trio of members have decided to step back from the Rust Core Team, including a nine-year veteran of the language.

      It has been a busy few months for the Rust project. The entire moderation team quit in November 2021. The resignation was, according to the post in GitHub on the matter, “in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves.”

      This week has kicked off with three of Core Team taking their leave. Florian Gilcher, a Core Team observer and project director on the Rust foundation board, is departing to focus on his company.

      Pietro Albini, meanwhile, reckoned he had too much to do, and is off to “focus on other parts of the project.”

Standards/Consortia

• A toy DNS resolver

  Hello! I wrote a comic last week called “life of a DNS query” that explains how DNS resolvers work.

  In this post, I want to explain how DNS resolvers work in a different way – with a short Go program that does the same thing described in the comic. The main function (resolve) is actually just 20 lines, including comments.

  I usually find it easier to understand things work when they come in the form of programs that I can run and modify and poke at, so hopefully this program will be helpful to some of you.

  The program is here: https://github.com/jvns/tiny-resolver/blob/main/resolve.go

Heeding James Joyce’s “Ulysses”

The mythical figures in Homer’s epic – Ulysses is the Latin name for Homer’s hero Odysseus – are reincarnated in the lives of the Irish working-class. Ulysses, the Greekking of Ithaca, whose ruse of the Trojan Horse made him the architect of the victory against Troy, who spent ten years trying to get home after ten years at war and slaughtered the suitors who besieged his wife and ravaged his court during his absence, becomes in Joyce’s hands Leopold Bloom, a 38-year-old ad canvasser for the nationalist newspaper Freeman’s Journal. Leopold, whose father was an observant Hungarian Jew, throughout the novel mourns his infant son Rudy, who died over a decade earlier, a loss that severed his sexual relations with his wife Molly. Ulysses’ son Telemachus, who grew up without his father and who, when he reached manhood, left Ithaca to search for Ulysses, becomes Stephen Dedalus, a fictionalized version of Joyce’s precocious younger self. Penelope, the loyal wife of Ulysses, is reinvented as Molly, the wife of Leopold Bloom, who during the day has a tryst with her lover, Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, and whose approximately 22,000-word monologue, one of the greatest in literature, affirming the sanctity of love and life – along with graphic descriptions of digestion, orgasms, and farts – concludes the book.

“Unimpressive as Bloom may seem in so many ways,” writes Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellman, “unworthy to catch marlin or countesses with Hemingway’s characters, or to sop up guilt with Faulkner’s, or to sit on committees with C.P Snow’s, Bloom is a humble vessel elected to bear and transmit unimpeached the best qualities of the mind. Joyce’s discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary.”

Of Mice and Men

This recent controversy on Maus’s suitability (or not) for Tennessee schoolchildren, though, has reinforced an unease I’ve had for quite a while on the uses and misuses of the extermination of European Jewry.

It should be said that the fact that the Holocaust is treated as such a matter of importance in the United States—which is, after all, a Christian country—is something that needs to be acknowledged. Considering the brutality meted out to Jews over the centuries, this is no small thing. (And the Holocaust and Nazi oppression were not just directed at Jews, of course.)

Hunter S. Thompson: Literary Gentleman from Louisville

Thompson always had a nose for notoriety as well as for the news, though he didn’t really find himself until 1970 at the age of 33 when Hinckle published in the pages of Scanlon’s, his sensational article, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” Alas, the magazine soon folded. Steadman provided the art for Thompson’s expose of Louisville’s filthy rich. Apparently, he drew the illustrations with lipstick and eyeliner.

Peter Richardson tells the riveting story of the Hinckle/Steadman/Thompson triumvirate in Savage Journey (University of California Press; $27.95), a biography, in which he also traces what he calls the “Weird Road to Gonzo.” True, the road could be bumpy with twists and turns, but Thompson’s journey looks and feels a lot more civilized than Richardson makes it seem. At times, Hunter —as friends called him— even appeared to be a gentleman of the old school, especially with his long cigarette holder and shiny bald head and in photos of him sitting next to Senator George McGovern in 1972. Gonzo was a genuine part of his act; much as Beat was a genuine part of Kerouac’s act.

The Militant Passion of Emma Tenayuca

Some knew her as la Pasionaria de Texas—the Texas Passionflower. Others called her Red Emma. But most of the people she fought alongside just called her “comrade.” Emma Tenayuca was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1916 to parents of Spanish and Comanche descent, and spent her childhood learning about Mexican identity, the evils of Jim Crow, and revolution from her grandfather. Emma was also constantly running off to Plaza del Zacate in San Antonio’s Milam Park to listen to anarchists and activists speak about politics and workers’ rights from their soapboxes. Her first experience on the picket line came when she was only 16. In 1933, she joined a group of Mexican women workers from the H.W. Finck Cigar Company, who were out on a wildcat strike over low wages and unsanitary working conditions. The teenager was horrified to witness the violent police response to the strike, and was arrested herself. That early baptism into the labor struggle convinced the young Tejana that she’d found her place—and her purpose.

‘The Thaw’ in black and white Photographer Vladimir Lagrange chronicled the Soviet 1960s and 1970s. Meduza looks back at his main works.

Vladimir Lagrange, who died in Moscow on January 22 at the age of 82, was an icon of national photography with work published in both the Soviet and foreign press. From 1959 to 1963, he worked in the news photography division of TASS. Until 1989, he was a special photo correspondent for the magazine Sovetsky Soyuz. He also worked for the magazine Rodina and in the Moscow bureau of the French agency Sipa Press. Following a memorial service on January 25, Meduza is publishing some of Lagrange’s classic images, with comments by Natalia Grigorieva-Litvinskaya, the director of the Lumière Gallery, which hosted an exhibit in 2019 titled “Lagrange Street.”

The Great Social Media Retreat

A few weeks ago I changed my life on a whim. I deleted my Reddit and Twitter accounts. To be fair, I have deleted my Twitter account before, so perhaps that one isn’t a big deal. My Reddit account on the other hand was practically a prized possession. So what caused me to delete it?

People. All of them. Myself included.

Life in the neighborhood

I’ve worked from home since 1998. All along I’ve hoped many more people would enjoy the privilege and share in the benefits. Now that it’s finally happening, and seems likely to continue in some form, let’s take a moment to reflect on an underappreciated benefit: neighborhood revitalization.

Titanium Edition

I still recall how hard it was to find where the right song was, especially once I had had a few drinks. Carrying around a stack of CDs wasn’t fun either. Music discovery was hard and friends, TV channels and radio stations were my main sources of ideas. Pirating music wasn’t exactly easy either, given how slow and expensive internet was back then. I think my first subscription for Internet over LAN was $20/month for something like 300MB/month total traffic. We’d exchange music with friends and I’d spend a lot of time scouring the LAN (usually with the help of DC). Younger people here probably have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m trying to make a point, though – because it was so hard to build a music collection, one had a lot of pride in theirs. Efforts give meaning to stuff.

Radio Amateurs & Skywatchers Rejoice, Sat Operators Worry: Solar Storm Incoming | Hackaday

How do you look back over your life and divide it up? Maybe by decades, cultural moments, or geopolitical events. For radio amateurs with older callsigns there’s a temptation to do so by solar cycles, as the roughly 11-year period of the Sun’s activity had a huge effect on radio propagation through the charge it creates in the upper atmosphere. We’re now in solar cycle 25, numbered since the 18th century when the science of solar observation began, and as never before we’re surrounded by information from experts such as [Dr. Tamitha Skov], the so-called [Space Weather Woman]. When she says something is on the way we listen, so a recent Tweet predicting a direct hit from a solar storm with a good probability of auroras in lower latitudes is very much worth sharing.

Science

• The Controversy Surrounding Hybrid Cryptography

  Despite the risks of greenfield cryptographic algorithms, the NSA has begun recommending a strictly-PQ approach to cryptography and have explicitly stated that they will not require hybrid designs.

• The Perils and Promises of Virtual Reality

  Thus begins David Chalmers enchanting new book Reality + which engages imaginatively with philosophical issues connected to Virtual Reality (VR).

  In his book, Chalmers argues for:

Education

• Where are All the Substitute Teachers?

  Some schools have even called on parents to step in to provide adult supervision in classrooms. In New Mexico, the governor has asked National Guard members to serve as substitute teachers.

  Normally schools hire substitutes to cover teacher absences. But there are so many teachers out with COVID-19 that the demand is much higher than usual.

Hardware

• An old photo of a very large BBS

  Nearly 30 years ago, I was given this picture. I wanted to present it in a post all by itself to give it a chance to “sink in” before I went and used it in an analogy. First, I’ll just show the image and explain what you’re looking at here.

• One machine can go pretty far if you build things properly

  I’ll admit: when I first saw that picture in 1993, I was in awe of the scale. It had never occurred to me what kind of layout you would need to run some of these systems at that level of scale. Some small part of me probably wanted to at least experience that, but I never actually went that far.

• Renaissance-Style Drone Would Make Da Vinci Proud Four Times Over | Hackaday

  For as much of a genius as Leonardo da Vinci obviously was, modern eyes looking upon his notebooks from the 1400s tend to see his designs as somewhat quaint. After all, his concept of a vehicle armored with wood would probably only have survived the archers and pikemen of a Renaissance battlefield, and his curious helicopter driven by an Archimedes screw would certainly never fly, right?

  Don’t tell that to [Austin Prete] and his team from the University of Maryland, who’ve built a da Vinci-style quadcopter that actually flies. Called the “Crimson Spin”, the quad is based on a standard airframe and electronics. Details are sparse — the group just presented the work at a vertical flight conference — but it appears the usual plastic props are replaced with lightweight screws made from wire and some sort of transparent plastic membrane. Opposing pairs of screws have the opposite handedness, which gives the quad yaw control. There’s a video embedded in the link above that shows the quad being tested both indoors and out, and performing surprisingly well. We’d imagine that Crimson Spin might not do so well on a windy day, given the large wind cross-section those screws present, but the fact it got off the ground at all is cool enough. It kind of makes you wonder where we’d be today if da Vinci had access to BLDCs.

• Rainbow DIP Switch Is The Coolest Way To Configure Your Project | Hackaday

  Oftentimes, when programming, we’ll put configuration switches into a config file in order to control the behaviour of our code. However, having to regularly open a text editor to make changes can be a pain. This colorful little DIP switch dongle from [Glen Aikins] makes for a fun alternative solution.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Data Highlights ‘Egregious’ Pandemic Profiteering by US Food and Oil Giants

  A new analysis released Tuesday ahead of a congressional hearing on pandemic-era price gouging shows that U.S. corporations in the food and energy sectors—from Tyson to Exxon Mobil—are pushing higher costs onto consumers while raking in ever-increasing revenues and handing executives massive pay packages.

  Conducted by the advocacy group Food & Water Watch (FWW), the analysis spotlights the fact that skyrocketing food and energy—specifically gasoline—prices have been major contributors to the overall rise of inflation in the U.S. Between December 2019 and December 2021, the nation’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) jumped by 8.5%.

• ‘Five Alarm Crisis’: Teachers Union Warns Pandemic Burnout Destroying Schools

  New polling out Tuesday reveals pervasive burnout among the nation’s educators as pandemic-related staffing shortages and other difficulties drive a potential exodus from the teaching profession.

  Released by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union of any profession, the member survey shows, according to NEA president Becky Pringle, that “after persevering through the hardest school years in memory, America’s educators are exhausted and increasingly burned out.”

• The Limits of Understanding the Pandemic Philosophically

  The Covid-19 pandemic has brought death to the forefront of daily life. Whether in the overwhelming moments of intimate grief or the omnipresent background hum of irrepressible dread, the virus’s deadly ramifications have been impossible to avoid. It is the ways in which we have responded to this crisis, however, that philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s latest work, The Palliative Society, wants to take up as the basis for cultural analysis. For, as Han writes in the opening to his book, “Our relation to pain reveals what kind of society we are.” Written in German in 2020 and now translated into English by Daniel Steuer, this short book (or perhaps, more accurately, long essay) attempts to position our social reaction to the pandemic as being of a piece with our contemporary inability to reckon with pain. Han seeks to utilize an extended reading of our relation to pain as a means of opening up a critique of our social, cultural, and political lives. But this work demonstrates both the possibilities and the pitfalls of taking up such a weighty historical moment in media res. Stuck somewhere between genuine insight and banal truisms, radical critique and reactionary entrenchment, The Palliative Society is never quite able to position the pandemic as a historic event, using it merely to confirm an argument that feels already well-rehearsed.

• Theranos Verdict: In the U.S., It Is Fine to Lie to Consumers but Not to Investors

  The evidence presented during the trial showed that Theranos technology did not work, and Holmes, while fully aware of it, knowingly falsified the results and forged reports. These “doctored reports” showed that major pharmaceutical companies endorsed her products, and even the U.S. military was using Theranos equipment in the field.

  Holmes got major names in the industry to invest almost a billion dollars in Theranos. The investors included the Walton family, who owns Walmart; Rupert Murdoch, the major media mogul; the family of Betsy DeVos, who was the former secretary of education under the Trump administration; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle; and many other people with deep pockets. Meanwhile, Theranos’ board of directors also had dazzling names including former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and former U.S. secretaries of defense James Mattis and William Perry.

• Opinion | Abortion: What a Complex Web They Weave

  Did you know?

• Native American tribes agree to $590M settlement with Johnson & Johnson, drug distributors over opioid epidemic

  “The Native American population has suffered some of the worst consequences of the opioid epidemic of any population in the United States. Indeed, American Indians have suffered the highest per capita rate of opioid overdoses,” the tribal leadership committee said in a statement filed with the court. “American Indians and Alaska Natives had the highest drug overdose death rates in 2015 and the largest percentage increase in the number of deaths over time from 1999-2015 compared to other racial and ethnic groups.”

  Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $150 million over the next two years while not admitting liability or wrongdoing. The company defended its promotion of the medications.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • How to Delete Your Spotify Account – Plus 5 Alternative Music Streaming Services

    If you’re ready to switch to one of many Spotify alternatives, you can delete your Spotify account. Just don’t forget to export all of your playlists with a service like Soundiiz. If you have Spotify Premium, you’ll need to head to the Spotify website to get the process started.

  • Lock-in and Multi-Cloud

    But that’s today. Let’s think ahead to 2030 and zero in on on a hypothetical future version of AWS. First, there was that unfortunate accident involving one of Elon’s satellites and the Blue Origin rocket Jeff was on. And Andy, a multibillionaire via that Amazon-CEO package, bought out the rest of the Kraken owners, then put in a surprise grab and owns the Seahawks too. He’s discovered that being a sports mogul beats the hell out of testifying on live TV to Pramila Jayapal.

    In this scenario, activist investors and big-time PE players have won a majority on the Amazon board and they don’t want any of their business units missing any chances to turn screws that maximize revenues. Data egress charges ratchet up every corner, as do high-level proprietary services like Kinesis and Lambda.

    A whole lot of customers have lost control of their cloud-computing spend; they pay whatever their AWS account manager tells them they’re gonna pay.

  • FBI says cyber actors could ‘disrupt’ Beijing Olympics, Paralympics [iophk: Windows TCO]

    The FBI noted it was not aware of any specific cyberattacks that were planning on being carried out but emphasized that athletes and others associated with the Games should remain vigilant, including by recommending that people leave their personal devices at home and use a temporary phone while in China.

  • Cyber-attack strikes German fuel supplies [iophk: Windows TCO]

    It has declared “force majeure” for the majority of its inland supply activities in Germany.

    The declaration of force majeure excuses a company from contractual agreements when an extraordinary event occurs which is beyond its control.

  • What I Learned When My Parents Got Arrested

    My parents, who had owned a software-resale business, had nothing to do with the piracy ring itself. Instead, they were charged with 30 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in what authorities described as a scheme to defraud Microsoft of millions of dollars by obtaining discounted academic software under false pretenses.

    Microsoft initially alleged that it lost as much as $100 million, and the local newspaper ran with that number. Overnight, everyone heard that my parents had been scooped up in a massive anti-​piracy raid. Their faces were plastered on the FBI website for days, and people assumed I was somehow sitting on $100 million stashed away in domestic and foreign accounts.

    Oh, how I wish it were true. I really could have used that money in the weeks and months that followed.

  • [Old] How to Set Up SSH 2fa (Two-Factor Authentication)

    This tutorial guides you through setting up Google Authenticator PAM to enable SSH 2FA for users connecting to a Linux server. We’ll use nano as our editor in examples.

  • Security

    • Update now: Samba prior to 4.13.17 hit with remote root code execution bug | ZDNet

      Samba has fixed a vulnerability in all versions of its software prior to version 4.13.17 that allowed for a remote actor to execute code as root, thanks to an out-of-bounds heap read write vulnerability.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Snowden Slams Ongoing Impunity for NSA’s Domestic Spying

        Exiled U.S. whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden on Tuesday called out years of impunity for the NSA violating Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights.

        Snowden’s tweet came in response to CNN reporting that the NSA “failed to follow both court-approved and internal procedures designed to prevent officials from using a controversial foreign surveillance law to inappropriately monitor Americans’ communications.”

      • ID.me Finally Admits It Runs Selfies Against Preexisting Databases As IRS Reconsiders Its Partnership With The Company

        Tech company ID.me has made amazing inroads with government customers over the past several months. Some of this is due to unvetted claims by the company’s CEO, Blake Hall, who has asserted (without evidence) that the federal government lost $400 billion to fraudulent COVID-related claims in 2020. He also claimed (without providing evidence) that ID.me’s facial recognition tech was sturdy, sound, accurate, and backstopped by human review.

      • Suicide Hotline Collected, Monetized The Data Of Desperate People, Because Of Course It Did

        Another day, another privacy scandal that likely ends with nothing changing.

      • Chicago Cops Love Them Some Facebook Sharing, According To Internal Facial Recognition Presentation

        Somewhere between the calls to end encryption and calls to do literally anything about crime rate spikes at this time of year, at this time of day, in [insert part of the country], localized entirely within [add geofence] lies the reality of law enforcement. While many continue to loudly decry the advent of by-default encryption, the reality of the situation is people are generating more data and content than ever. And most of it is less than a warrant away.

      • Birthday wishes inadvertently give away private information online

        Dilara Kekulluoglu at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and her colleagues found more than 18 million Twitter posts that mentioned “happy birthday” in a 45-day period. Of those, 2.8 million directly mentioned a user, so they could be used to ascertain an individual’s birthday. More than 66,000 of these tweets also gave away the age of the user, and therefore their full date of birth.

        Only around 2 per cent of the Twitter users mentioned in those posts shared their birth years on their profiles, so the team warns that well-wishers are exposing this information for users who haven’t proactively shared it themselves.

      • The EARN IT Act is back in Congress

        The original EARN IT Act’s sponsors touted endorsements from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other groups, and it took aim at a surge of online child sexual abuse content. But the bill was strongly condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union and many advocates for online civil liberties, sex workers, and LGBT rights — who argued that it would encourage companies to abandon strong encryption and privacy protections for users. Some of these groups, including Fight For the Future, have issued statements against the revived bill as well. The bill is scheduled to be discussed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

      • EU: Mass travel surveillance: no problem, says court

        The Passenger Name Record (PNR) Directive was agreed in April 2016 and mandates the surveillance and profiling of almost all air passengers entering, travelling within, or leaving the EU. Passenger data has to be transmitted by travel companies and airlines to Passenger Information Units (PIUs) operated by national police forces.

      • A cautious green light for technology-driven mass surveillance

        This cursory analysis sheds light on some of the AG’s Opinion’s shortcomings. It thus follows that the CJEU should deviate from Pitruzzella’s recommendations. The PNR Directive, due to the severity of its effects and its inherent inefficiency in fulfilling its stated purpose, produces disproportionate interferences with Articles 7 and 8 CFR. It ought to be invalidated.

      • IRS plan to scan your face prompts anger in Congress, confusion among taxpayers

        Millions of Americans could soon have to scan their faces to access their Internal Revenue Service tax accounts, one of the government’s biggest expansions yet of facial recognition software into people’s everyday lives.

        For now, taxpayers can still file their returns the old-fashioned way; the IRS began accepting returns for 2021 earnings on Monday, encouraging electronic filing.

        But by this summer, anyone wanting to access their records — including details about child tax credits, payment plans or tax transcripts — on the IRS website could be required to record a video of their face with their computer or smartphone, and send it to the private contractor ID.me to confirm their identity.

      • Facial recognition for all online IRS accounts: What’s up with ID.me?

        The IRS uses ID.me — a third-party service with a thorough registration process that includes uploading a “video selfie” through ID.me’s facial recognition software — to manage new signups for the agency’s online tax services.

        Soon, everyone who wants to use IRS services online — including viewing and making payments online, updating a mailing address, and accessing the Child Tax Credit Update Portal — will need to register through ID.me.

      • The IRS is reportedly looking for ID.me alternatives amid privacy concerns

        Last year, the IRS announced its plans to start requiring people who file their taxes online to register with third-party facial recognition company ID.me. Through the service, users will have to submit a video selfie using a webcam or mobile device to verify their identity. The IRS is supposed to roll out the program this summer.

        Although ID.me previously claimed it only uses one-to-one facial matching, which involves matching a user’s face with images of the same face, ID.me CEO Blake Hall admitted it uses technology that matches faces against a larger database. This only exacerbates privacy concerns — politicians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and digital rights advocates have already spoken out about the IRS’ use of the software.

      • Website fined by German court for leaking visitor’s IP address via Google Fonts

        Earlier this month, a German court fined an unidentified website €100 ($110, £84) for violating EU privacy law by importing a Google-hosted web font.

        The decision, by Landgericht München’s third civil chamber in Munich, found that the website, by including Google-Fonts-hosted font on its pages, passed the unidentified plaintiff’s IP address to Google without authorization and without a legitimate reason for doing so. And that violates Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

      • Website operator fined for using Google Fonts “the cloudy way”

        The court agreed, demanded that the website operator start hosting fonts locally, and awarded the complainant damages of €100 (about $110).

        The court’s argument doesn’t seem to be suggesting any and all other third party “widget linking” is now considered illegal in Germany (or, more particularly, in the region where this court holds sway), but only that websites are expected to host content locally if that’s easily possible: [...]

      • Confidentiality

        • Why I won’t use Let’s Encrypt

          Why do not I forcefully redirect people from HTTP to HTTPS?

          First reason is that I just do not have geographically distributed servers under my control. Most of my websites are hosted both on my own home server and on some VPS in another city. I can not set up TLS on VPS, because its hosting company obviously will have access to all of its internals, including TLS private keys. Currently my websites have two IP addresses, with two independent HTTP servers, but with only single HTTPS server and single dummy TCP-proxy located on VPS. If my main server is down, then the whole HTTPS is down too. If I give TLS private keys to the hosting company, then what is the point of using TLS and lying that it can authenticate the endpoint domain?

          Second reason is that it is not my responsibility to impose user the desired security protocol usage. Possibly there is already IPsec transport session, transparently securing the link. Possibly we use some overlay network like Yggdrasil, where TLS is just pointless. My tarballs and Git tags are always signed with OpenPGP key. TLS even won’t give any metadata privacy there because of known tarballs/pages sizes.

          Next point is that there just can not be some objectively absolutely valid and proper global scale PKI certificate. Because its validity fully depends on your exact point of view, specifically on what trust anchors you use and validation rules you apply.

Defence/Aggression

• McEnany’s Texts Lead to Request for Ivanka Trump to Speak With Jan. 6 Committee

• More Than a Dozen HBCUs Faced Bomb Threats on First Day of Black History Month

• NATO Nonsense and Panic

  Many or most U.S. media overlooked it – that is, buried it. Or emasculated it. In Germany they couldn’t fully ignore it – though unpleasant as a messy cat cadaver near the red carpet at a major film event. This was no star-studded premiere, however, but a dangerous, frightening political and military program, and the disturbing element was not a raggedy, dead alley-cat but the elegantly-uniformed boss of the German Navy. Yet here, too, a demise was involved – that of the vice-admiral’s career!

  What sin earned him such a fate? When asked about the month-long NATO-Washington campaign against Putin and Russia, based only on vague, dubious assumptions and prophesies by anonymous experts yet rushing headlong toward military catastrophe, this top-level expert had the temerity to puncture the foundation of the whole campaign with one word: “Nonsense!”

• International Support Grows for Mexico’s Lawsuit Against US Gun-Makers

  In a big boost to the Mexican government’s historic federal lawsuit against American gun-makers, 13 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, two countries, a coalition of attorneys general, and numerous advocacy groups on Monday filed or joined amicus briefs supporting Mexico’s litigation, which seeks to hold weapons manufacturers accountable for the violence they facilitate. 

  “The defendant gun manufacturers send guns to Mexico, where transnational drug cartels use them to inflict violence on both sides of the border.”

• Opinion | How Much More Deadly Will the Next Variant of Trumpism Be?

  Imagine that you were experiencing all of this (and by this, I mean our lives right now) as if it were a novel, à la Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.  The famed author of Robinson Crusoe — Defoe claimed it had been written by the fictional Crusoe himself — was five years old in 1665. That was when a year-long visitation of the bubonic plague decimated London. It probably killed more than 100,000 of that city’s residents or 15% of its population. As for Defoe, he published his “journal” in 1722, 57 years later. He wrote it, however, as if he (or his unidentified protagonist) had recorded events as they were happening in the way that all of us, whatever our ages, have been witnessing the ravages of the many variants of Covid-19 in our own all-too-dismantled lives.

• Opinion | North Korea, Perpetual Victim of the US Military-Industrial Complex

  It seems hard to believe that in these possible end times in the midst of a global pandemic with an endless succession of catastrophic climate disasters and thousands of nuclear weapons poised and pointed in the U.S. and Russia, ready to destroy life on earth, we are beset by a bought, corrupted mainstream media that assaults us with the “wrongdoings” of Russia and China, and most recently North Korea, with barely a mention in their assaultive reporting of how the U.S. might be the cause in the matter.  Nor do they report on the many remedies that have been rejected by the United States in its drive for global domination. Instead of promoting the critical opportunities we must now seize—all nations and peoples of the world—to work cooperatively to save Mother Earth, the western news reports serve up a steady daily diet of the harm that could be inflicted upon an innocent United States, echoing shades of the dreadful 1950s McCarthy Era in a new Cold War II and maybe World War III. 

• A Police Car Hit a Kid on Halloween 2019. The NYPD Is Quashing a Move to Punish the Officer.

  It was a little more than two years ago that I really started learning about the reality of police oversight in America.

  On Halloween night in 2019, my wife and our then-6-year-old daughter were walking home from trick-or-treating in our Brooklyn neighborhood when they saw a New York Police Department car go the wrong way down a street and smack into a teenager, who fell and then ran away.

• Amid US-Russia Escalation, Activists Emphasize NATO Is “Not About Security”

• ‘We have other problems’ As the world worries about an all-out war between Russia and Ukraine, Meduza reports from the border with the Donbas

  Since the fall of 2021, media outlets around the world have been discussing the possibility of another Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has had troops massed near the Ukrainian border for several months now — in response, NATO countries, led by the United States, have deployed additional forces to Eastern Europe and are threatening the Kremlin with sanctions. What do people living near the Russian border with Ukraine think about these escalating tensions? For Meduza, journalist Gleb Golod traveled to towns and villages in Russia’s Rostov region to find out.

• 100+ Anti-War Groups Demand Biden End Brinkmanship With Russia

  More than 100 advocacy organizations representing millions of people across the U.S. demanded Tuesday that the Biden administration take immediate steps to defuse tensions with Russia as the two nuclear-armed powers remain perilously close to war over Ukraine.

  “We call upon President Biden to end the U.S. role in escalating the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia,” the progressive groups said in a joint statement spearheaded by CodePink and RootsAction.org. “It is gravely irresponsible for the president to participate in brinkmanship between two nations that possess 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.”

• The Exit From the Ukraine Crisis That’s Hiding in Plain Sight

  The crisis over Ukraine grows simultaneously more dangerous and more absurd. Russia has amassed more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, demanding that NATO not admit Ukraine and stop its expansion east. Russian officials want those demands answered immediately, but President Vladimir Putin also says he won’t make war.

• Russia Gains Much From Threats to Invade Ukraine, But Knows That Actually Doing So Would be a Disaster

  Russian troops might be able to capture Kyiv in a week, but this would only be the start of a long war that Russia would find it impossible to win. A more limited Russian offensive in east Ukraine – such as seizing a land corridor between the Russian separatist Donbas and Russian annexed Crimea – is scarcely a more attractive option. It would push the rest of Ukraine further into the embrace of Nato, which would be exactly the opposite of what Russia wants.

  President Putin may be vindictive and unpredictable, but he has never overplayed his hand as Russian leader in military conflicts from Chechnya in 1999 to Syria in 2015. In all cases, Western hopes and expectations that he was plunging into a quagmire were disappointed.

• More Than 100 Antiwar Groups Call on Biden to End Brinksmanship With Russia

• “It’s Not About Security”: Belgian Peace Activist Says NATO Has Outlived Its Purpose

  To speak about the key role NATO is playing in the Ukraine crisis, we speak with Ludo De Brabander, spokesperson of the peace organization Vrede vzw in Belgium, where NATO is headquartered. De Brabander says NATO has outlived its purpose, and touches on how activists in NATO countries like Belgium are pushing against narratives in the media that war with Russia is necessary.

• Germany Refuses to Send Arms to Ukraine Despite Pressure from U.S. & NATO

  Germany’s new coalition government is refusing to send lethal weapons to Ukraine but has offered to send over 5,000 combat helmets to protect Ukrainian soldiers in case of a Russian attack. The move has been ridiculed as the U.S. and other NATO countries continue to send military support to Ukraine. In response, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has promised his country will stay in tune with European Union and NATO policies toward Russia. To speak more about Germany’s stance toward Ukraine, we’re joined by German peace activist and executive director of the International Peace Bureau Reiner Braun, who calls on the European Union to establish a more “common politics with Russia” to prevent a war in Central Europe. He also says war in the region could result in use of nuclear weapons that would lead to “the end of Europe.”

• Ukrainians Doubt a Russian Invasion Is Imminent as U.S. Peace Groups Urge Biden to Halt Escalation

  The United States and Russia sparred on Monday over the crisis in Ukraine at the United Nations Security Council. Meanwhile, U.S. senators are preparing to unveil a bill that would target Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian banks and other entities with sanctions. To discuss the Ukraine crisis, we’re joined by the co-founder of CodePink, Medea Benjamin, who says “we need the voice of the American people” to oppose U.S. escalation and also calls on U.S. progressives to vocalize their opposition to fueling a war in Europe. We also speak with Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, who says Ukrainian intelligence does not see a Russian invasion as likely or economically wise for Russia.

• How US meddling split Sudan, creating an oil republic drowning in poverty and conflict

• Nigeria and Indonesia cement defence ties

  Following a meeting between the Indonesian Ambassador to Nigeria Usra Harahap and the executive vice-chairman of Nigeria’s National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), Mohammed Sani Haruna, both countries accepted a draft letter of intent on bilateral defence cooperation.

  The NASENI’s mission is to further the transfer of technologies to Nigeria in various areas including defence and aeronautics. Haruna told The Guardian Nigeria that Indonesia would assist the country in developing “aircraft, both civil and military, the armoured personnel carrier, and other equipment needed by the military”, with approval from the Nigerian Federal government.

• Taiwan Detects Chinese Electronic Warfare Aircraft Near Island

  The Taiwanese MND stated that the aircraft flew on Monday between Taiwan and Pratas, an island in the northern South China Sea, which the government controls in Taiwan.

• Ambitious China gears up to flex power in the conflict-riven Horn of Africa

  The Horn of Africa – located in the easternmost corner of the African continent, takes its name from the horn-shaped land formation at the southern end of the Red Sea and on the Gulf of the Aden. Five of the region’s seven countries – the Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and landlocked Ethiopia, are situated looking into the Indian Ocean south of the Arabian Peninsula. Located on the main shipping route for the transport of oil from the Persian Gulf to Europe and the United States, the Horn of Africa is considered one of the most strategically important regions in the world. Sadly the region is endowed with rivers, lakes, forests and livestock, and has untapped rich deposits of natural resources including gold, petroleum, salt and natural gas etc. Yet its two hundred million people remain one of the poorest on the earth.

• Accused American ISIS leader ‘highly intelligent’ and ‘marksman’: Former friend

  One former friend, who said she last spoke to Fluke-Ekren more than 10 years ago, painted a picture of a woman who was close with her family but then became increasingly radicalized. Fluke-Ekren was arrested in Syria, where she moved a decade ago and married a “prominent” ISIS leader, according to court documents.

• Turkey Helps ISIS Attack Rojava

  It’s no accident that the time bomb exploded on the fourth anniversary of Turkey’s invasion and occupation of Afrin in 2018. Turkey’s support of ISIS and other jihadis is an open secret. A Turkish drone even bombed an SDF vehicle that was racing to Hasaka to help recapture ISIS prisoners. According to an October 2021 report on ISIS sleeper cells, raids resulting in the arrest of ISIS members brought to light documents showing links to Turkish intelligence, suggesting that the two coordinate closely. The SDF believes the Hasaka attack was organized by Turkish forces and their proxies in territories Turkey occupied in 2019, including Serekaniye and Tal Abyad, and the plan was for the ISIS prisoners to flee there and regroup.

• Trump Steals a Strategy From Mussolini’s Playbook

  That was a dangerous signal in and of itself, as it came from a former president with a track record of abusing his pardon authority for political purposes. It suggested a willingness to employ the power of the presidency to circumvent legitimate and necessary legal accountability for those who launched a deadly attack on the US Capitol, and for himself—as the man who told those at the January 6 rally to head to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

• Trump Says He Would Consider Pardons for Jan. 6 Defendants if Elected

  At least 700 people have been arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 [insurrection], including 11 who have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Some have said they believed they were doing Mr. Trump’s bidding.

Environment

• As China replants its own forests, it is destroying the world’s

  These developments might be interpreted as proof of China’s dedication to protecting trees. Is there substance to such an interpretation, or is the declared appreciation for forests merely a mirage?

  If history is any guide, reality hews to the latter. That’s because China has a very long record of razing forests to feed its development. Alongside its economic rise in recent decades, it has taken on an outsize and accelerating role in global deforestation.

• First Latin American e-waste report published

  The report was produced by the Sustainable Cycles (SCYCLE) Programme, co-hosted by the UN University (UNU) and the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). It covers the 13 countries participating in the UNIDO-GEF LAC E-waste project: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

• Biden Praised for Reversing Trump Effort to Unleash More Toxic Air Pollution

  The Biden administration on Monday won strong praise from public health defenders following the Environmental Protection Agency’s move to restore the legal basis for regulating mercury and other toxic air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants.

  “Administrator Regan has taken a critical step forward in restoring vital public health protections.”

• After Passing ‘Point of No Return’ in 2014, Hot Oceans Are Now ‘New Normal’

  A study published Tuesday revealed that ocean heatwaves fueled by human-caused climate change passed the “point of no return” in 2014 and have become the “new normal.”

  “These dramatic changes we’ve recorded in the ocean are yet another piece of evidence that should be a wake-up call to act on climate change.”

• Energy

  • North Carolina Fertilizer Plant Fire Forces Thousands to Evacuate

    Thousands of residents who live within a one-mile radius of a fertilizer plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina were ordered to immediately evacuate after a fire broke out at the facility Monday night.

    Although firefighters initially battled the blaze at the Winston Weaver Co. fertilizer plant, located at 4440 N. Cherry St., the crews were pulled back after about an hour and a half due to the explosion risk, Fire Chief Trey Mayo said during a Tuesday morning press conference.

  • Climate Groups Urge Biden Not to Fight Ruling Against Oil and Gas Lease Sale

  • Biden Urged Not to Fight Court Ruling Against Massive Oil and Gas Lease Sale

    As the fossil fuel industry clamors for an appeal, the Biden administration on Tuesday faced pressure from environmentalists to adhere to a judge’s decision blocking a massive oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon spill.

    “We urge you to comply with the court’s ruling and not appeal the court’s decision,” more than 70 climate groups wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. “The [Department of the Interior] should not continue to defend unlawful drilling for oil and gas in public waters in appellate court given the impacts on our climate, clear violations of federal environmental standards, and public commitments made by President Biden to end the practice.”

  • Protests Erupt in Argentina Over Plan for Offshore Oil Drilling

    On January 4, thousands of people took to the streets of Mar del Plata, a coastal city roughly 250 miles south of Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were there to protest the plans by Norwegian oil company Equinor to begin offshore oil exploration later this year. 

    They held signs that read “the sea is ours!” and “an ocean free of oil,” and they chanted, shouted, and sang. The protests were focused in Mar del Plata, a beach town closest to the offshore blocks, but spread to other cities in the province and around the country. 

  • Lobbyist Behind The Sun’s Petrol Car Ban Survey Admits He Used ‘Loaded’ Question

    A survey supposedly showing public opposition to the government’s plans to phase out petrol and diesel cars was carried out by a motoring lobbyist who admits he “doesn’t care” that the poll involved a “loaded” question.

    The Sun reported on Saturday that “fuming voters” oppose the UK’s 2030 ban on new fossil fuel-powered cars, with three in five people saying they would not vote for an MP who supports it. 

  • Oil Is Killing the Planet — And Driving Inflation

    Today’s inflation isn’t just caused by a post-pandemic rebound in fuel prices, but a long-term exhaustion of oil production. We need to end our dependency on fossil fuels without it becoming the pretext for another wave of austerity.

  • The Case Against [Cryptocurrency]

    I’ve long been extremely skeptical of [cryptocurrency]1, regardless of all the hype surrounding it, and me being surrounded by many people who are very passionate about it. Seems there’s no shortage of believers in [cryptocurrency] and blockchain in the tech circles, and no shortage of people who are drawn to “get rich quick” schemes. I’ve been meaning to write a bit of thoughts on the subject for a while now, but Martin O’Leary saved me some work by writing a fantastic article that perfectly reflects my own sentiment. In a nutshell: [...]

  • Should I get my paycheck in crypto? Experts weigh in as America Competes Act looms

    In December 2020, Russell Okung became the first NFL player to be paid part of his salary in Bitcoin. Other pro-athletes have followed suit, with Aaron Rodgers announcing in October 2021 that he would also be paid partially in Bitcoin and Trevor Lawrence placing his signing bonus in a cryptocurrency account in April 2021.

  • Bitcoin miners pressed on climate impact, power consumption

    Cryptocurrencies have come under increasing fire for the industry’s power consumption, which is now comparable to the entire country of Argentina.

    The letters raise the stakes in Senator Warren’s campaign to crack down on wasteful Bitcoin operations after she sent a similar request in December to Greenidge Generation Holdings, which powers its upstate New York facility with a natural gas plant.

  • We’re in a Climate Crisis — But the Pipelines Keep Coming

    The Spire case is exceptional in a number of ways, and yet experts say the project’s problems exemplify everything that is wrong with the natural gas pipeline approval process.

  • Meta abandons its cryptocurrency venture, Diem

    The Facebook-backed digital currency project Diem announced Monday the winding down and $182-million sale of its technology, capping a years-long initiative that drew significant concern from regulators.

  • Facebook Is Reportedly Trying To Sell Off Its Botched Cryptocurrency

    Facebook made a huge splash in 2019 when it announced Libra, a “stable digital cryptocurrency” meant to revolutionize global financial technologies. Even the likes of Uber, Spotify, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard were on board, signing on as corporate partners with a $10 million stake each.

    But the ambitious venture imploded after facing fierce backlash from US regulators and even governments around the world.

• Overpopulation

  • Anti-natalism (and other problems)

    My main annoyance is, and I’ve (anecdote alert) encountered this time and time again, is people who are like “I don’t need to eat plants or cut down on air travel because I’m not gonna have kids”… and then they do end up having kids.

    It’s such a science-fiction, implausible, scapegoat of a solution.

Finance

• Government Contracting: the Next Big Battleground for a More Equal America?

• Opinion | No Quick Fixes: Working Class Politics From Jim Crow to the Present

  With a new book out Tuesday reflecting on his years growing up within—and moving through—the racist apartheid order that loomed over the U.S. South in the 1950s and 60s during his upbringing and early adulthood, political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. offers his unique perspective on the Jim Crow era, but please do not call it a memoir.

• A Wall Street Veteran Speaks Out – Bubbles & the Planet

  Nowadays, a lot of the air has come out of hot stocks of the covid era, losing 30%-40%-50%, or more, in only a couple of months, e.g. Netflix falling from $700 down to $390/share within 3 weeks. That’s a lot of hot air wheezing out quickly. As Joe Granville, market technician 1923-2013, famously said: They (investors) are “bag-holders.”

  The title of the Bloomberg Grantham article refers to more than overvalued stocks, wherein he claims a Goldilocks period over “the past 25 years is ending, and the world needs to prepare for a future of inflation, slower growth, and labor shortages,” as stated in the Bloomberg Front Row interview.

• More Thoughts on the Great Inflation Debate

  There are three main components to the Summers-Furman (SF) argument. (Their arguments are not identical, so I’m being a bit unfair to both in trying to mash them together.)  The first is that the Biden administration provided excessive stimulus to the economy with the American Recovery Act (ARA) passed by Congress last February. They argue that demand for goods and services far exceeded the economy’s ability to supply them, leading to a sharp uptick in the rate of inflation.

  Second, the SF position is that this jump in inflation has unmoored inflationary expectations. While households and businesses had long come to expect low and stable inflation, the surge in inflation we saw in the last year has changed people’s expectations. Just to be clear, this is more Summers’s concern than Furman’s. Also, he views this as a serious risk, but not a necessary outcome from the current situation.

• We Can’t Let Build Back Better Be Replaced With Manchin’s Wish List

• Poor People’s Campaign Denounces Dems’ Push for Means-Tested Child Tax Credit

  Leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign on Tuesday blasted Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposal to means-test a child tax credit that expired because the Senate hasn’t passed the House-approved Build Back Better Act—largely due to opposition from the West Virginia Democrat.

  “Sen. Manchin and others want to do away with it now—not because it didn’t work, but because it did.”

• Inflation Policies Must Deal With Impact of Rising Food Prices on the Poor

• Amid Push for Ban, Lawmakers Traded $355 Million of Stock in 2021

  As the coronavirus pandemic continued to roil the U.S. economy and take lives in 2021, congressional lawmakers and their family members went on a stock buying and selling spree, trading an estimated $355 million worth of shares in Facebook, Apple, and other prominent corporations.

  According to a new analysis of financial disclosures by Capitol Trades and reporting from MarketWatch, at least 113 members of Congress have divulged stock transactions completed by themselves or members of their families in 2021.

• ‘Puerto Rico Hasn’t Had the Opportunity to Develop Its Own Economic Future’

  Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Popular Democracy’s Natalia Renta about the Puerto Rican debt deal for the January 28, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Nature on the Political Chopping Block

• New 5-Minute Video Summarizes Joe Manchin’s ‘Brazen’ Corruption

  Although right-wing Sen. Joe Manchin’s financial conflicts of interest have been well-documented, a new video released Monday details how the West Virginia Democrat’s “brazen” corruption has derailed his party’s immensely popular economic policies.

  Not only did Manchin take more than $1 million from corporate-tied PACs last year as he watered down and obstructed the Build Back Better Act (BBB), but he “repeatedly timed his key attacks on [President Joe] Biden’s agenda to occur at events with his largest corporate donors,” according to pro-worker media group More Perfect Union, which summarizes its research in the following five-minute video.

• Pro-government media outlets receive preference at government briefings

  Regardless of viewership, popularity, or readership, the government gives preference to pro-government journalists and their media outlets during its regular press conferences. Critical media outlets, such as Telex, are left standing at the back of the line. This became clear when we carefully looked through all the government briefings in 2021 and noted the order in which journalists present were addressed by the politicians leading the events. Translation by Dominic Spadacene

• Big tech should reimburse victims of online scams: British lawmakers

  Big tech companies whose online platforms carry advertisements for scams should be made to reimburse victims, British lawmakers said, as part of wider efforts to combat a growing epidemic of online fraud in Britain.

  While banks have signed up for a voluntary code to reimburse fraud victims who do enough to protect themselves, there is not sufficient regulation governing social media and other websites where victims are often first lured in, Mel Stride, chairman of the cross-party Treasury committee, told Reuters

• Twitter’s algorithm favours the political right, a recent study finds

  In this climate, Twitter commissioned a study to understand whether their algorithm may be biased towards a certain political ideology. While Twitter publicised the findings of the research in 2021, the study has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS.

• Nord Stream 2: Russia-Germany gas pipeline becomes a geopolitical lever

  The crisis surrounding Ukraine has been a harsh reminder to Europeans of just how dependent they are on Russian energy supplies. While the European Union weighs its options for a united and robust response to Russia if Vladimir Putin decides to invade Ukraine, the bloc is feeling a new sense of unease over its dependence on Russian oil and gas.

• Nord Stream 2: The gas pipeline’s second power struggle

  Germany is almost totally reliant on natural gas imports, with Russia accounting for more than half of supplies in 2020, according to IHS Markit.

  Europe’s No.1 economy needs to wean itself off coal and nuclear as part of its energy transition, and wants to use natural gas as a bridge until it can build or import enough renewable energy.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Neil Young, Joe Rogan, and a Swedish Billionaire

  I think part of the reason why I feel like I’m not communicating well when I write about Spotify is I focus so much on the negative aspects of the operation.  Another reason is I tend to forget that just because it is by far the most popular music streaming platform on the planet, what this means in practice is that there are hundreds of millions of mostly young people around the world for whom listening to music means opening Spotify, but then there are billions of other people around the world, largely middle-aged or older folks, who have never used a music streaming app of any kind.

  So I’d just like to put it out there now at the outset that I completely understand why Spotify is so popular, and I use the platform regularly, despite all my complaints about the way the company is run.  I am also a regular user of so many other platforms that are run by other very large corporations with predatory corporate practices, including but not limited to Facebook, Google, Uber, and Airbnb.

• Joe Rogan row puts cost of Spotify podcasts under investor microscope

  Spotify investors will focus on how much its ‘Netflix for audio’ strategy is costing the streaming service when it reports fourth-quarter results on Wednesday against the backdrop of several angry high-profile artists withdrawing their tracks.

  Over the past four years, Spotify has spent more than $1 billion on podcasts such as Joe Rogan’s in an attempt to triumph over rival music subscription services from Apple and Amazon.

• The Joe Rogan controversy is what happens when you put podcasts behind a wall

  We’re moving away from a world in which a podcast player functions as a search engine and toward one in which they act as creators and publishers of that content. This means more backlash and room for questions like: why are you paying Rogan $100 million to distribute what many consider to be harmful information? Fair questions!

  This is the cost of high-profile deals and attempts to expand podcasting’s revenue. Both creators and platforms are implicated in whatever content’s distributed, hosted, and sold, and both need to think clearly about how they’ll handle inevitable controversy.

• Joe Rogan Issues Absolutely Terrible Apology For Covid Misinfo

  He posted a video on his Instagram on Sunday wherein he addressed the criticism that his show has spread COVID misinformation. While he was quick to offer a full apology to Spotify, he stopped short of a complete mea culpa to Young and Mitchell, nevermind the public to whom he’s been spreading extremely dubious fear about vaccines.

• Oh Spotify…

  If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, you wouldn’t have heard about the shit show that is Joe Rogan sharing COVID misinformation on his podcast and Spotify doing nothing about it.

  Needless to say, this has caused uproar all over the Internet and it seems that people are boycotting the platform, with Neil Young being the most vocal on the matter.

• Spotify’s Joe Rogan Problem Isn’t Going Away

  Mr. Rogan could double down on Covid-19 misinformation, daring Spotify to de-platform him and casting himself as a “victim of the woke mob,” censored for speaking too many uncomfortable truths. He could wriggle out of his Spotify deal and head back to YouTube and to the other platforms that used to carry his show. (He could even go to a right-wing social network like Gettr or Parler, but I’m guessing he’d prefer an audience.)

• Spotify Isn’t Really About the Music Anymore

  The company’s deal with Rogan was part of a larger strategic shift whose implications listeners may not fully understand. Since launching in 2008, Spotify has transformed the music world by helping make on-demand streaming a reality for millions of listeners and rescuing the industry’s coffers from a years-long decline. But Spotify pays most of its revenues from songs back to labels and artists and has rarely turned a profit. In 2019, the company announced a new focus on “audio,” meaning recorded books, live chats, and the booming medium of podcasts. Spotify began paying out millions in exclusive deals with such creators as Rogan, the Obamas, Bill Simmons’s Ringer network, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

• Spotify is more than just a bystander to Joe Rogan’s misinformation

  In response to the growing boycott fronted by Young and Mitchell, Spotify has promised to amend its protocols, applying a “content advisory” to podcast episodes that discuss covid-19, which the company says will link to reliable sources about the pandemic. It’s a move straight from the social media company playbook, reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter’s efforts to rein in misinformation that could cause real-life harm to its users. It’s a response that might befit Spotify if an unknown podcaster uploaded an episode exclaiming the benefits of ivermectin, the horse-deworming drug that Rogan has falsely claimed helps treat covid-19.

  But Rogan isn’t an unknown podcaster uploading to a platform, getting paid fractions of a cent per stream. Rogan is on Spotify’s payroll to the tune of $100 million.

• Insult atop injury to Syrian photographer as China diplomat misuses war photos

  Lijian, seeking a correction and apology for the use without permission of his work and the misrepresentation of the images. Zhao’s Jan. 24 tweet said: “This is 20 years of war, America’s consequences for children in ‘Afghanistan’.” Suleiman noticed it on Jan. 27.

  “These large and small shells are the Syrian Assad regime supported by Russia…the legacy of attacks against Syrian civilians and children,” wrote Suleiman, who at 23 has spent half his life with his country embroiled in a brutal civil war.

  “He did not contact me and did not apologize after deleting the tweet,” Suleiman told RFA’s Mandarin Service in an interview by text, translated from Arabic to English.

• Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Officially Responds to Neil Young’s Pullout — Here’s His Complete Statement

• Spotify’s Joe Rogan Mess Exposes Larger Rift Over Rules, Streaming Revenues

  But as Spotify is under the spotlight for its handling of Rogan — who released an episode in December featuring a vaccine skeptic who baselessly claimed people were being “hypnotized” to believe facts about COVID, sparking 270 medical pros to write an open letter in protest — the rift is exposing issues that artists and content creators have long been frustrated about. Even Young, who left “because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines,” added elsewhere in his exit letter on his website that Spotify “continues to peddle the lowest quality in music reproduction.”

• Graham Nash and India Arie join Neil Young’s Spotify boycott over ‘problematic’ Rogan

  Nash declared his support for his Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young bandmate Tuesday after “having heard the COVID disinformation spread by Joe Rogan on Spotify.” Young previously pulled much of his music library from the app after Spotify failed to cut ties with Rogan, a controversial podcast host known for fueling conspiracy theories about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines.

  “I am requesting that my solo recordings be removed from the service,” Nash said in a statement. “There is a difference between being open to varying viewpoints on a matter and knowingly spreading false information which some 270 medical professionals have derided as not only false but dangerous.

• Fact check: WikiLeaks did not release footage that proves moon landing staged

  The claim was fact-checked by Reuters and found to be false.

Censorship/Free Speech

• As the Right Censors Public Libraries, Families Are Forming Banned Book Clubs

• Eleanor Goldfield and Nolan Higdon Return to the Program – The Project Censored Show

  Eleanor Goldfield is a creative radical, journalist, artist, and organizer. She is co-host of the Common Censored podcast with Lee Camp. She also produced a documentary, Hard Road of Hope, about West Virginia communities confronting pollution from fracking. The Craig Murray article she mentions (about Julian Assange) can be found here.

• YouTube Dusts Off Granular National Video Blocking To Assist YouTuber Feuding With Toei Animation

  Hopefully, you will recall our discussion about one YouTuber, Totally Not Mark, suddenly getting flooded with 150 copyright claims on his YouTube channel all at once from Toei Animation. Mark’s channel is essentially a series of videos that discuss, critique, and review anime. Toei Animation produces anime, including the popular Dragon Ball series. While notable YouTuber PewDiePie weighed in with some heavy criticism over how YouTube protects its community in general from copyright claims, the real problem here was one of location. Matt is in Ireland, while Toei Animation is based out of Japan. Japan has terrible copyright laws when it comes to anything resembling fair use, whereas Ireland is governed by fair dealing laws. In other words, Matt’s use was just fine in Ireland, where he lives, but would not be permitted in Japan. Since YouTube is a global site, takedowns have traditionally been global.

• Cal State Poly, Pomona Professor Accused of Anti-Semitism – Censored Notebook

  Jaime Scholnick, a Los Angeles-based artist and adjunct professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona is under pressure from university administration as a result of unfounded accusations of “anti-Semitism” by a former student.

• How to Get Teenagers to Read Important Books? Ban Them.

  The real reason I wanted to read The Catcher in the Rye was it had been banned from the library. I knew the librarian kept one copy behind her desk, and I was determined to get it. She reluctantly handed it to me. I read it voraciously.

• Swedish publishers demand China free jailed bookseller Gui Minhai

  A group of Swedish publishers on Monday demanded Beijing release Chinese-Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2020 on charges of illegally providing intelligence abroad.

  Gui, one of five Hong Kong-based booksellers known for publishing salacious titles about China’s political leaders, has been at the centre of diplomatic tensions between Stockholm and Beijing for more than six years.

• Controversial House Bill 1134 would limit classroom curriculum

  “Contrary to some social media post, HB1134 was NOT adopted into law. It simply passed out of the House after multiple amendments (some comments have reflected the original draft). It now moves over to the Senate for further consideration, amendment, or to die. I appreciate the passion shown around this legislation and welcome the attention and debate it’s drawn. Bullet points for HB1134 as it stands today: [...]

• University of Hong Kong covers up 33-year-old Tiananmen tribute painted on bridge, weeks after removing statue

  Residents at Swire Hall painted the slogan on the bridge after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. A bloody military intervention ended months of student-led demonstrations on June 4 that year. It is estimated that hundreds, perhaps thousands, died in Beijing when the People’s Liberation Army cleared the protests.

  Every year since then, HKU students have retouched the slogan leading up to the anniversary. The 20-character inscription reads: “Souls of martyrs shall forever linger despite the brutal massacre; Spark of democracy shall forever glow for the demise of evils.”

• Chinese censors give Fight Club movie a new ending where police win

  The first rule of Fight Club in China? Don’t mention the original ending. The second rule of Fight Club in China? Change it so the police win.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Pirates nominate whistleblower Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize

  The Pirates in the European Parliament have submitted the nomination of Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. For the Pirates, the case of Assange, who is currently imprisoned in the United Kingdom, is a symbol for the oppression of freedom of speech and the public’s right to information

• Foreign journalists in China face lawsuits, intimidation, state-backed trolling attacks, media group says

  Threats of legal action, online troll campaigns and dwindling numbers after the expulsion of colleagues — foreign journalists in China are facing “unprecedented hurdles” from efforts to discredit independent reporting, a press group said Monday.

  Beijing appears to be “encouraging a spate of lawsuits”, or the threat of legal action against foreign journalists, often filed long after sources agreed to interviews, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) said in its annual report.

• Apply For The 2022 Marvel Cooke Fellowship For Abolition Journalism

  Shadowproof is proud to welcome applications for the 2022 Marvel Cooke Fellowship. 

  The fellowship’s mission is to fund reporting from writers of color on abolition movements around the world. We are specifically looking for journalists who have a history of engagement and experience with abolition, and who produce journalism with an abolitionist ethic.

• Criminalising journalists for telling the truth is in nobody’s interest

  State manipulation of the media is why journalism has developed beyond the mainstream print and broadcast worlds, which seem to have lost the ability to challenge authority and embarrass governments and big business. Today, though, there is a new breed of journalist operating in the realm of social media; much to the mainstream media’s annoyance, we are seeing the continued growth of a new and very valid kind of journalism, accompanied by a vicious backlash to discredit the new media kids on the block.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Opinion | The Absurdity of Protecting Kids From the Holocaust Narrative ‘Maus’

  Nudity and bad language.  That’s a Tennessee school board’s excuse for banning Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus.”  Not Holocaust denial.  Not antisemitism.

• ‘Shame on Them’: DOJ Will Not Reopen Tamir Rice Case

  The mother of Tamir Rice, who was shot to death at age 12 by a Cleveland, Ohio police officer, condemned the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision not to reopen her son’s case.

  “Shame on them,” Samaria Rice told Buzzfeed News Monday after receiving a letter from the DOJ regarding the Biden administration’s decision. “I think they’re pitiful and pathetic, and at this point no one is going to get justice when it comes to police shootings in America. It’s disgusting I don’t have an indictment for my 12-year-old son.”

• Anti-BDS Law in Texas Violates Free Speech Rights, Federal Judge Rules

  Progressives welcomed a federal judge’s recent ruling that Texas cannot forbid an engineering firm hired by Houston city officials from boycotting Israel to protest its subjugation of Palestinians—and vowed to keep fighting until the state’s anti-boycott law is thrown out completely.

  As The Texas Tribune reported Monday:

• Opinion | US Supreme Court Nomination Debates Are Dangerous

  Justice Breyer has announced his resignation from the Supreme Court and a Biden/Harris pick is expected to win confirmation. The Democrats’ choice is unlikely to shift the court’s balance, we’re told, but the media’s milquetoast reassurance misses the point that when it comes to balance  it’s not just the court, it’s also the public debate that’s shifted dramatically to the right. And nomination fights have a nasty habit of playing a big role in that.

• Progressive Urge Biden to Nominate Justice on Side of Workers, Not Corporations

  Following a number of U.S. Supreme Court rulings favoring powerful corporations, progressives are demanding that President Joe Biden nominate a successor to Justice Stephen Breyer who will represent the interests of working people, continuing the trend he began with his nominations to lower federal courts.

  The one potential nominee the White House has confirmed is on the president’s shortlist—U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs—is not reassuring labor advocates that their call will be answered.

• Opinion | The Moral Panic of Critical Race Theory Is a Right-Wing Tool

  The moral panic currently sweeping America about Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been covered ad nauseum by the press and commentators across the political spectrum.  That’s what typically happens with moral panics (more on that in a moment). 

• Mayoral Candidate Faces Backlash After Saying She Wants to “Eradicate” Islam

• The Hypocrisy of American Islamophobia

  Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6 insurrection by describing him as “a devout Christian.” It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American. Since September 11, and even before that ominous date, they have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.

• Massachusetts Court Says Breathaylzers Are A-OK Less Than Three Months After Declaring Them Hot Garbage

  Breathalyzers are like drug dogs and field tests: they are considered infallible right up until they’re challenged in court. Once challenged, the evidence seems to indicate all of the above are basically coin tosses the government always claims to win. Good enough for a search or an arrest when only examined by an interested outsider who’s been subjected to warrantless searches and possibly bogus criminal charges. But when the evidentiary standard is a little more rigorous than roadside stops, probable cause assertions seem to start falling apart.

• Tibetan former political prisoner in failing health still watched by police

  “He is succumbing to weak health due to the beatings he received in prison, and is now in critical condition with both his legs crippled,” RFA’s source said, citing contacts in the Draggo area and speaking on condition of anonymity to protect his sources.

• ‘Low-Skill’ Workers Don’t Exist, But Low-Wage Workers Do

  On day four of his tenure as mayor of New York City, Eric Adams made a gaffe that drew the ire of many who know the lie of “low-skill” labor. Advocating for the return of workers to their midtown offices, he said, “My low-skill workers, my cooks, my dishwashers, my messengers, my shoe-shine people, those who work at Dunkin’ Donuts — they don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office.” His poor choice of words drew backlash from across the internet (myself included). He rephrased his poor choice of words soon after, and Twitter moved on.

  But the harm perpetuated by the myth of low-skill labor lingers. It’s an old lie, one that has implications much bigger than what Mayor Adams was alluding to. Historically, enforcing the idea that a worker is low-skilled has proved to be an excellent way to justify suppressing their wages.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Techdirt Podcast Episode 309: Remembering The SOPA Fight, With Rep. Zoe Lofgren

  As many of you know, last week we hosted an online event for the latest Techdirt Greenhouse edition, all about looking back on the lessons learned from the 2012 protests against SOPA and PIPA. Our special guest was Rep. Zoe Lofgren, one of the strongest voices in congress speaking out against the disastrous bills, who provided all kinds of excellent insight into what happened then and what’s happening now. In case you missed it, for this week’s episode of the podcast (yes, we’re finally back with new episodes!) we’ve got the full conversation and Q&A from the event.

• Senate’s New EARN IT Bill Will Make Child Exploitation Problem Worse, Not Better, And Still Attacks Encryption

  You may recall the terrible and dangerous EARN IT Act from two years ago, which was a push by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham to chip away more at Section 230 and to blame tech companies for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). When it was initially introduced, many people noticed that it would undermine both encryption and Section 230 in a single bill. While the supporters of the bill insisted that it wouldn’t undermine encryption, the nature of the bill clearly set things up so that you either needed to encrypt everything or to spy on everything. Eventually, the Senators were persuaded to adopt an amendment from Senator Patrick Leahy to more explicitly attempt to exempt encryption from the bill, but it was done in a pretty weak manner. That said, the bill still died.

• Senators’ ‘Myths & Facts’ About EARN IT Is Mostly Myths, Not Facts

  I already wrote a long post earlier about the very very real problems with the EARN IT Act — namely that it would make the problem of child sexual abuse material significantly worse by repeating the failed FOSTA playbook, and that it would attack encryption by making it potential “evidence” in a case against a tech company for any CSAM on its site. But with the bill, the sponsors of the bill, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham, released a “Myth v. Fact” document to try to counter the criticisms of EARN IT. Unfortunately, the document presents an awful lot of “myths” as “facts.” And that’s a real problem.

Monopolies

• Google parent company Alphabet broke $200 billion in annual revenue for the first time

  Google parent company Alphabet hit a new record for annual revenue in 2021, showing no ill effects from the lingering coronavirus pandemic or ongoing issues with the global supply chain. For full-year 2021, the company saw a 41 percent year-over-year jump in revenue to $257 billion. The company reported revenue of $75.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, up 32 percent from the year earlier.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • Podcast Episode: Saving Podcasts from a Patent Troll

      That’s exactly the situation faced by a group of podcasters several years ago, including comedian Marc Maron, who hosts the WTF podcast. They were being threatened by a patent troll called Personal Audio, which claimed that podcasters were infringing on a patent that covered “disseminating media content in a serialized sequence.”

      On this episode of How to Fix the Internet, Marc Maron and his producer Brendan McDonald join EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien to talk about how they decided not to give in, and how podcasters came together to support EFF’s work to defeat the patent.

      Click below to listen to the episode now, or choose your podcast player:

• Copyrights

  • Anime YouTuber Battle Against Copyright Results In New YouTube Rule

    YouTube decided not to honor Toei’s removal request because it would violate the platform’s fair use policy. Instead, YouTube asked Toei to provide further justification for why Fitzpatrick’s channel should be removed. Rather than provide that evidence, Toei used YouTube’s automated claim system to have the videos blocked.

  • U.S. Seeks Significant Prison Sentence for SPARKS Member to Deter Other Pirates

    Later this month, a 52-year old British man will be sentenced by a New York federal court for his role in the SPARKS piracy Scene group. Mr. Bridi, who was extradited to the US from Cyprus previously pleaded guilty. While the defense argues that a reduced sentence is warranted, the U.S. Government is asking the court to award a significant 27 to 33-month term to deter other pirates.

  • Anti-Piracy Group Received $290K in Settlements from Usenet Pirates in 2021

    Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has revealed that during 2021, it took down five Usenet indexing platforms and approached 38 uploaders of content for settlement. Overall, BREIN collected cash payments of $290K from pirates, with settlements presented as an alternative to protracted and expensive legal battles.

  • Episode 1: Open Culture VOICES – Medhavi Gandhi

    We are excited to share the first episode of Open Culture VOICES, a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this interview, we hear from Medhavi Gandhi, founder of The Heritage Lab, India’s first digital platform that connects museums and citizens through engaging campaigns, content and resources.

  • That’s A Wrap On The Public Domain Game Jam! Check Out All This Year’s Great Entries

    Last night at midnight, we reached the end of Gaming Like It’s 1926, our fourth annual public domain game jam celebrating the new works that entered the public domain this year. At final count, we got 31 entries representing a huge variety of different kinds of digital and analog games!